Content-Based Image Retrieval Based on ROI Detection and Relevance Feedback

Content-based image retrieval is an important research topic in computer vision. We present a new method that combines region of interest (ROI) detection and relevance feedback. The ROI based approach is more accurate in describing the image content than using global features, and the relevance feedback makes the system to be adaptive to subjective human perception. The feedback information is utilized to discover the subjective ROI perception of a particular user, and it is further employed to recompute the features associated with ROIs with the updated personalized ROI preference. A fast computation technique is proposed to avoid repeating the ROI detection for images in the database. It directly estimates the features of the ROIs, which makes the query process fast and efficient. For illustration of the overall approach, we use the color saliency and wavelet feature saliency to determine the ROIs. Normalized projections are selected to represent the shape features associated with the ROIs. Experimental results show that the proposed system has better performance than the global features based approaches and region based techniques without feedback.