Graph cuts based relevance feedback in image retrieval

Relevance feedback (RF) allows users to be actively involved in the information retrieval process and has been widely used in various information retrieval tasks. While most existing RF methods in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) focus on visual features of individual images only, in this paper we formulate the relevance feedback process as an energy minimization problem. The energy function takes into account both the feature aspect of each image and the manifold structure among individual images. The solution of labelling images as relevant or irrelevant is obtained with the graph cuts method. As a result, our method enables flexibly partitioning the feature space and labelling of images and is capable of handling challenging scenarios (or queries). Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the popular RF methods.