Graph Based Re-ranking Method with Application to Handwritten Digits

In this paper a new perspective is provided on the re-ranking problem, which is essential in pattern recognition and computer vision tasks. Items are efficiently organized using the minimal spanning tree (MST) and the orthogonal-MST graph and their similarity is calculated through an appropriate graph traversal method. The graph is augmented consecutively providing alternative paths, however not escaping the data manifold. The introduced method exploits the structure of the underlined manifold and is successfully applied (but not limited) to handwritten digits image database.