A Hybrid Approach for Improved Content-based Image Retrieval using Segmentation

The objective of Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) methods is essentially to extract, from large (image) databases, a specified number of images similar in visual and semantic content to a so-called query image. To bridge the semantic gap that exists between the representation of an image by low-level features (namely, colour, shape, texture) and its high-level semantic content as perceived by humans, CBIR systems typically make use of the relevance feedback (RF) mechanism. RF iteratively incorporates user-given inputs regarding the relevance of retrieved images, to improve retrieval efficiency. One approach is to vary the weights of the features dynamically via feature reweighting. In this work, an attempt has been made to improve retrieval accuracy by enhancing a CBIR system based on color features alone, through implicit incorporation of shape information obtained through prior segmentation of the images. Novel schemes for feature reweighting as well as for initialization of the relevant set for improved relevance feedback, have also been proposed for boosting performance of RF- based CBIR. At the same time, new measures for evaluation of retrieval accuracy have been suggested, to overcome the limitations of existing measures in the RF context. Results of extensive experiments have been presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches

An Improved Relevance Feedback in CBIR

Relevance Feedback in Content-Based Image Retrieval is a method where the feedback of the performance is being used to improve itself. Prior works use feature re-weighting and classification techniques as the Relevance Feedback methods. This paper shows a novel addition to the prior methods to further improve the retrieval accuracy. In addition to all of these, the paper also shows a novel idea to even improve the 0-th iteration retrieval accuracy from the information of Relevance Feedback