MultiVCRank with Applications to Image Retrieval

In this paper, we propose and develop a multi-visual-concept ranking (MultiVCRank) scheme for image retrieval. The key idea is that an image can be represented by several visual concepts, and a hypergraph is built based on visual concepts as hyperedges, where each edge contains images as vertices to share a specific visual concept. In the constructed hypergraph, the weight between two vertices in a hyperedge is incorporated, and it can be measured by their affinity in the corresponding visual concept. A ranking scheme is designed to compute the association scores of images and the relevance scores of visual concepts by employing input query vectors to handle image retrieval. In the scheme, the association and relevance scores are determined by an iterative method to solve limiting probabilities of a multi-dimensional Markov chain arising from the constructed hypergraph. The convergence analysis of the iteration method is studied and analyzed. Moreover, a learning algorithm is also proposed to set the parameters in the scheme, which makes it simple to use. Experimental results on the MSRC, Corel, and Caltech256 data sets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. In the comparison, we find that the retrieval performance of MultiVCRank is substantially better than those of HypergraphRank, ManifoldRank, TOPHITS, and RankSVM.