Refining image retrieval using one-class classification

Can we take advantage of the huge number of online images to improve image search quality? Motivated by this question, we propose a novel model to re-rank Google image search results by exploring the latent characteristic of massive unrelated images as a clue to filter them in the reranking. Inspired by the characteristic of the intrinsic diversity and the unwanted availability of the unrelated images, in our model, we adopt one-class classification to build a hyper-sphere for the target objects, unrelated images, and construct a robust boundary to distinguish them from the related images effectively. Then the Google results can be easily re-ranked by filtering the unrelated images with the built-up model. Extensive experiments demonstrate our approach outperforms Google image search engine´s results, even if its baseline is high.