Improving image retrieval effectiveness via multiple queries

Conventional approaches to image retrieval are based on the assumption that relevant images are physically near the query image in some feature space. This is the basis of the cluster hypothesis. However, semantically related images are often scattered across several visual clusters. Although traditional Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) technologies may utilize the information contained in multiple queries (gotten in one step or through a feedback process), this is often only a reformulation of the original query. As a result most of these strategies only get the images in some neighborhood of the original query as the retrieval result. This severely restricts the system performance. Relevance feedback techniques are generally used to mitigate this problem. In this paper, we present a novel approach to relevance feedback which can return semantically related images in different visual clusters by merging the result sets of multiple queries. We also provide experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.