Subspace Clustering and Label Propagation for Active Feedback in Image Retrieval

In recent years, relevance feedback has been studied extensively as a way to improve performance of content-based image retrieval (CBIR). However, since users are usually unwilling to provide many feedbacks, the insufficiency of the training samples limited the success of relevance feedback. To tackle this problem, we propose two coupled algorithms: (i) overlapped subspace clustering to select representative images for user’s feedback; and (ii) multi-subspace label propagation to include unlabeled data in the training process. As these two algorithms are both working on sub feature spaces of the image database, they can not only deal with the insufficient training samples but also well capture the user’s attention during the retrieval process. Experimental results on a large database of general-purposed images demonstrated the high effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.