Large-Scale Text to Image Retrieval Using a Bayesian K-Neighborhood Model

In this paper we introduce a new approach aimed at solving the problem of image retrieval from text queries. We propose to estimate the word relevance of an image using a neighborhood-based estimator. This estimation is obtained by counting the number of word-relevant images among the K-neighborhood of the image. To this end a Bayesian approach is adopted to define such a neighborhood. The local estimations of all the words that form a query are naively combined in order to score the images according to that query. The experiments show that the results are better and faster than the state-of-the-art techniques. A special consideration is done for the computational behaviour and scalability of the proposed approach.