Active concept learning in image databases

Concept learning in content-based image retrieval systems is a challenging task. This paper presents an active concept learning approach based on the mixture model to deal with the two basic aspects of a database system: the changing (image insertion or removal) nature of a database and user queries. To achieve concept learning, we a) propose a new user directed semi-supervised expectation-maximization algorithm for mixture parameter estimation, and b) develop a novel model selection method based on Bayesian analysis that evaluates the consistency of hypothesized models with the available information. The analysis of exploitation versus exploration in the search space helps to find the optimal model efficiently. Our concept knowledge transduction approach is able to deal with the cases of image insertion and query images being outside the database. The system handles the situation where users may mislabel images during relevance feedback. Experimental results on Corel database show the efficacy of our active concept learning approach and the improvement in retrieval performance by concept transduction.