Web Image Search Re-Ranking With Click-Based Similarity and Typicality

In image search re-ranking, besides the well-known semantic gap, intent gap, which is the gap between the representation of users’ query/demand and the real intent of the users, is becoming a major problem restricting the development of image retrieval. To reduce human effects, in this paper, we use image click-through data, which can be viewed as the implicit feedback from users, to help overcome the intention gap, and further improve the image search performance. Generally, the hypothesis—visually similar images should be close in a ranking list—and the strategy—images with higher relevance should be ranked higher than others—are widely accepted. To obtain satisfying search results, thus, image similarity and the level of relevance typicality are determinate factors correspondingly. However, when measuring image similarity and typicality, conventional re-ranking approaches only consider visual information and initial ranks of images, while overlooking the influence of click-through data. This paper presents a novel re-ranking approach, named spectral clustering re-ranking with click-based similarity and typicality. First, to learn an appropriate similarity measurement, we propose click-based multi-feature similarity learning algorithm, which conducts metric learning based on click-based triplets selection, and integrates multiple features into a unified similarity space via multiple kernel learning. Then, based on the learnt click-based image similarity measure, we conduct spectral clustering to group visually and semantically similar images into same clusters, and get the final re-rank list by calculating click-based clusters typicality and within-clusters click-based image typicality in descending order. Our experiments conducted on two real-world query-image data sets with diverse representative queries show that our proposed re-ranking approach can significantly improve initial search results, and outperform several existing re-ranking approaches.