가변적인 길이의 특성 정보를 지원하는 특성 가중치 조정 기법

Abstract

Among the approaches to image database management, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is viewed as having the best support for effective searching and browsing of large digital image libraries. Typical CBIR systems allow a user to provide a query image, from which low-level features are extracted and used to find “similar” images in a database. However, there exists the semantic gap between human visual perception and low-level representations. An effective methodology for overcoming this semantic gap involves relevance feedback to perform feature re-weighting. Current approaches to feature re-weighting require the number of components for a feature representation to be the same for every image in consideration. Following this assumption, they map each component to an axis in the n-dimensional space, which we call the metric space; likewise the feature representation is stored in a fixed-length vector. However, with the emergence of features that do not have a fixed number of components in their representation, existing feature re-weighting approaches are invalidated. In this paper we propose a feature re-weighting technique that supports features regardless of whether or not they can be mapped into a metric space. Our approach analyses the feature distances calculated between the query image and the images in the database. Two-sided confidence intervals are used with the distances to obtain the information for feature re-weighting. There is no restriction on how the distances are calculated for each feature. This provides freedom for how feature representations are structured, i.e. there is no requirement for features to be represented in fixed-length vectors or metric space. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach and in a comparison with other work, we can see how it outperforms previous work.