Relevance Feedback in Image Retrieval Systems: A Survey

The relevance feedback based approach in image retrieval system has been an active research field in the past few years. This powerful technique has been proved successful in many application areas. Various ad hoc parameter estimation techniques have been proposed for relevance feedback. In addition, methods that perform relevance feedback on multi-level image model have been formulated. The method of relevance feedback is based on the most popular vector model used in information retrieval, and most of the previous relevance feedback research can be classified into two approaches: query point movement and re-weighting techniques. More recently, the new trend towards taking advantages of the semantic contents of the images in addition to the low-level features has appeared. This paper surveys recent studies on relevance feedback techniques image databases. Throughout the discussion, we will introduce the ideas of various kinds of techniques and compare their performances.