Client-Side Relevance Feedback Approach for Image Retrieval in Mobile Environment

With the proliferation of handheld devices, the demand of multimedia information retrieval on mobile devices has attracted more attention. A relevance feedback information retrieval process usually includes several rounds of query refinement. Each round incurs exchange of tens of images between the mobile device and the server. With limited wireless bandwidth, this process can incur substantial delay making the system unfriendly to use. We address this issue by considering a client-side relevance feedback (CRF) technique. Since relevance feedback is done on client side, system response is instantaneous significantly enhancing system usability. Furthermore, since the server is not involved in relevance feedback processing, it is able to support thousands more users simultaneously. Our experimental results indicate that this scheme also effectively address the semantic gap in content-based image retrieval.