Query refinement and user relevance feedback for contextualized image retrieval

The motivation of this paper is to enhance the user perceived precision of results of content based information retrieval (CBIR) systems with query refinement (QR), visual analysis (VA) and relevance feedback (RF) algorithms. The proposed algorithms were implemented as modules into K-Space CBIR system. The QR module discovers hypernyms for the given query from a free text corpus (such as Wikipedia) and uses these hypernyms as refinements for the original query. Extracting hypernyms from Wikipedia makes it possible to apply query refinement to more queries than in related approaches that use static predefined thesaurus such as Wordnet. The VA Module uses the K-Means algorithm for clustering the images based on low-level MPEG - 7 Visual features. The RF Module uses the preference information expressed by the user to build user profiles by applying SOM- based supervised classification, which is further optimized by a hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The experiments evaluating the performance of QR and VA modules show promising results.