Combining Intra-Image and Inter-Class Semantics for Image Matching

Definition:Both local (intra-image) and global (inter-class) similarities play complementary roles in image matching and ranking, so a simple linear combination scheme has been experimented with significant performance improvement over single image matching schemes.

Given an image retrieval system, the information need of a user can be modeled as the posterior probability of the set of relevant images R given an expression of the information need in the form of query specification q and an image x in the current database, P(R|q,x). The objective of the system is to return images with high probabilities of relevance to the user.

In Query By Example, P(R|q,x) depends on the similarity between query q and image x. On the other hand, we note that the set of relevant images R does not exist until a query has been specified. However we can construct prior categories of images Ck, k=1, 2, …, M as some prototypical instances of R and compute the memberships of q and xto these prior...