Interactive image retrieval by query fusion

The use of low-level visual features such as colour and shape in content-based image retrieval system leads to several ambiguities. Specifically, due to the many-to-many mapping between the low-level feature space and high-level user concepts, a conceptual user query may not be modelled as a single point in the feature space. Furthermore, conceptually similar images may not fall close to each other in the low-level feature space. This work addresses these issues by proposing an interactive technique, query feedback. This method employs user input to represent a high-level conceptual query as various points in the low-level space. Thus, similarity to a given conceptual query is obtained as the fusion of several low-level representations in the feature space.