Mapping low-level features to high-level semantic concepts in region-based image retrieval

In this paper, a novel offline supervised learning method is proposed to map low-level visual features to high-level semantic concepts for region-based image retrieval. The contributions of this paper lie in three folds. (1) For each semantic concept, a set of low-level tokens are extracted from the segmented regions of training images. Those tokens capture the representative information for describing the semantic meaning of that concept; (2) a set of posteriors are generated based on the low-level tokens through pairwise classification, which denote the probabilities of images belonging to the semantic concepts. The posteriors are treated as high-level features that connect images with high-level semantic concepts. Long-term relevance feedback learning is incorporated to provide the supervisory information needed in the above offline learning process, including the concept information and the relevant training set for each concept; (3) an integrated algorithm is implemented to combine two kinds of information for retrieval: the information from the offline feature-to-concept mapping process and the high-level semantic information from the long-term learned memory. Experimental evaluation on 10,000 images proves the effectiveness of our method.