Content-based Information Retrieval via Nearest Neighbor Search

Content-based information retrieval (CBIR) has attracted significant interest in the past few years. When given a search query, the search engine will compare the query with all the stored information in the database through nearest neighbor search. Finally, the system will return the most similar items. We contribute to the CBIR research the following: firstly, Distance Metric Learning (DML) is studied to improve retrieval accuracy of nearest neighbor search. Additionally, Hash Function Learning (HFL) is considered to accelerate the retrieval process. On one hand, a new local metric learning framework is proposed - Reduced-Rank Local Metric Learning (R2LML). By considering a conical combination of Mahalanobis metrics, the proposed method is able to better capture information like data\u27s similarity and location. A regularization to suppress the noise and avoid over-fitting is also incorporated into the formulation. Based on the different methods to infer the weights for the local metric, we considered two frameworks: Transductive Reduced-Rank Local Metric Learning (T-R2LML), which utilizes transductive learning, while Efficient Reduced-Rank Local Metric Learning (E-R2LML)employs a simpler and faster approximated method. Besides, we study the convergence property of the proposed block coordinate descent algorithms for both our frameworks. The extensive experiments show the superiority of our approaches. On the other hand, *Supervised Hash Learning (*SHL), which could be used in supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised learning scenarios, was proposed in the dissertation. By considering several codewords which could be learned from the data, the proposed method naturally derives to several Support Vector Machine (SVM) problems. After providing an efficient training algorithm, we also study the theoretical generalization bound of the new hashing framework. In the final experiments, *SHL outperforms many other popular hash function learning methods. Additionally, in order to cope with large data sets, we also conducted experiments running on big data using a parallel computing software package, namely LIBSKYLARK

Reduced-Rank Local Distance Metric Learning

Abstract. We propose a new method for local metric learning based on a conical combination of Mahalanobis metrics and pair-wise similarities between the data. Its formulation allows for controlling the rank of the metrics ’ weight matrices. We also offer a convergent algorithm for training the associated model. Experimental results on a collection of classification problems imply that the new method may offer notable performance advantages over alternative metric learning approaches that have recently appeared in the literature

Unsupervised Image Denoising in Real-World Scenarios via Self-Collaboration Parallel Generative Adversarial Branches

Deep learning methods have shown remarkable performance in image denoising, particularly when trained on large-scale paired datasets. However, acquiring such paired datasets for real-world scenarios poses a significant challenge. Although unsupervised approaches based on generative adversarial networks offer a promising solution for denoising without paired datasets, they are difficult in surpassing the performance limitations of conventional GAN-based unsupervised frameworks without significantly modifying existing structures or increasing the computational complexity of denoisers. To address this problem, we propose a SC strategy for multiple denoisers. This strategy can achieve significant performance improvement without increasing the inference complexity of the GAN-based denoising framework. Its basic idea is to iteratively replace the previous less powerful denoiser in the filter-guided noise extraction module with the current powerful denoiser. This process generates better synthetic clean-noisy image pairs, leading to a more powerful denoiser for the next iteration. This baseline ensures the stability and effectiveness of the training network. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art unsupervised methods.Comment: Accepted to ICCV 202

Hash Function Learning Via Codewords

In this paper we introduce a novel hash learning framework that has two main distinguishing features, when compared to past approaches. First, it utilizes codewords in the Hamming space as ancillary means to accomplish its hash learning task. These codewords, which are inferred from the data, attempt to capture similarity aspects of the data’s hash codes. Secondly and more importantly, the same framework is capable of addressing supervised, unsupervised and, even, semisupervised hash learning tasks in a natural manner. A series of comparative experiments focused on content-based image retrieval highlights its performance advantages

Accelerated Learning Of Generalized Sammon Mappings

The Sammon Mapping (SM) has established itself as a valuable tool in dimensionality reduction, manifold learning, exploratory data analysis and, particularly, in data visualization. The SM is capable of projecting high-dimensional data into a low-dimensional space, so that they can be visualized and interpreted. This is accomplished by representing inter-sample dissimilarities in the original space by Euclidean inter-sample distances in the projection space. Recently, Kernel Sammon Mapping (KSM) has been shown to subsume the SM and a few other related extensions to SM. Both of the aforementioned models feature a set of linear weights that are estimated via Iterative Majorization (IM). While IM is significantly faster than other standard gradient-based methods, tackling data sets of larger than moderate sizes becomes a challenging learning task, as IM\u27s convergence significantly slows down with increasing data set cardinality. In this paper we derive two improved training algorithms based on Successive Over-Relaxation (SOR) and Parallel Tangents (PARTAN) acceleration, that, while still being first-order methods, exhibit faster convergence than IM. Both algorithms are relatively easy to understand, straightforward to implement and, performance-wise, are as robust as IM. We also present comparative results that illustrate their computational advantages on a set of benchmark problems. © 2011 IEEE