A Multiple Instance Approach for Keyword-Based Retrieval in Un-annotated Image Database

Abstract

In image retrieval, if user can describe their query concepts by keywords, search results can be returned efficiently and precisely by matching query keywords with text annotation in image databases. However, even if the query keyword is given, keyword-based retrieval can not be applied directly in an image database without any text annotation. The development of Web mining and searching techniques has enabled us to search images in Web by keywords. Thus, we can search the query keywords given by user through Web to obtain example images, and then find those images relevant to user’s query in image database with the help of these example images. In order to improve the image retrieval performance, we adopt multiple instance learning when calculating the similarity between example images and images in database. Experiments validate that our method can effectively improve the retrieval performance in un-annotated image database.