Combining positive and negative examples in relevance feedback for content-based image retrieval

In this paper, we address some issues related to the combination of positive and negative examples to improve the efficiency of image retrieval. We start by analyzing the relevance of the negative example and how it can be interpreted and utilized to mitigate certain problems in image retrieval, such as noise, miss, the page zero problem and feature selection. Then we propose a new relevance feedback approach that uses the positive example (PE) to perform generalization and the negative example (NE) to perform specialization. In this approach, a query containing both PE and NE is processed in two steps. The first step considers the PE alone, in order to reduce the set of images participating in retrieval to a more homogeneous subset. Then, the second step considers both PE and NE and acts on the images retained in the first step. Mathematically; relevance feedback is formulated as an optimization of the intra and inter variances of the PE and NE. The proposed relevance feedback algorithm was implemented in our image retrieval system, which we tested on a collection of more than 10,000 images. The experimental results show how the NE as considered in our model can contribute in improving the relevance of the images retrieved. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.