Survey on Web Image Re-Ranking Using Query-Specific Semantic Signatures

Image re-ranking, as an effective way to improve the results of web-based image search, has been adopted by current commercial search engines such as Bing and Google. Given a query keyword, a pool of images are first retrieved based on textual information. By asking the user to select a query image from the pool, the remaining images are re-ranked based on their visual similarities with the query image. A major challenge is that the similarities of visual features do not well correlate with images’ semantic meanings which interpret users’ search intention. In this paper, we propose a novel image re-ranking framework, which automatically offline learns different semantic spaces for different query keywords. The visual features of images are projected into their related semantic spaces to get semantic signatures. At the online stage, images are re-ranked by comparing their semantic signatures obtained from the semantic space specified by the query keyword. The proposed query-specific semantic signatures significantly improve both the accuracy and efficiency of image re-ranking Index Terms: Image search, image re-ranking, semantic space, semantic signature, keyword expansion