Image retrieval based on multi-concept detector and semantic correlation

With the rapid development of future network, there has been an explosive growth in multimedia data such as web images. Hence, an efficient image retrieval engine is necessary. Previous studies concentrate on the single concept image retrieval, which has limited practical usability. In practice, users always employ an Internet image retrieval system with multi-concept queries, but, the related existing approaches are often ineffective because the only combination of single-concept query techniques is adopted. At present semantic concept based multi-concept image retrieval is becoming an urgent issue to be solved. In this paper, a novel Multi-Concept image Retrieval Model (MCRM) based on the multi-concept detector is proposed, which takes a multi-concept as a whole and directly learns each multi-concept from the rearranged multi-concept training set. After the corresponding retrieval algorithm is presented, and the log-likelihood function of predictions is maximized by the gradient descent approach. Besides, semantic correlations among single-concepts and multiconcepts are employed to improve the retrieval performance, in which the semantic correlation probability is estimated with three correlation measures, and the visual evidence is expressed by Bayes theorem, estimated by Support Vector Machine (SVM). Experimental results on Corel and IAPR data sets show that the approach outperforms the state-of-the-arts. Furthermore, the model is beneficial for multi-concept retrieval and difficult retrieval with few relevant images.