Integrating relevance feedback techniques for image retrieval using reinforcement learning

Abstract—Relevance feedback (RF) is an interactive process which refines the retrievals to a particular query by utilizing the user’s feedback on previously retrieved results. Most researchers strive to develop new RF techniques and ignore the advantages of existing ones. In this paper, we propose an image relevance reinforcement learning (IRRL) model for integrating existing RF techniques in a content-based image retrieval system. Various integration schemes are presented and a long-term shared memory is used to exploit the retrieval experience from multiple users. Also, a concept digesting method is proposed to reduce the complexity of storage demand. The experimental results manifest that the integration of multiple RF approaches gives better retrieval performance than using one RF technique alone, and that the sharing of relevance knowledge between multiple query sessions significantly improves the performance. Further, the storage demand is significantly reduced by the concept digesting technique. This shows the scalability of the proposed model with the increasing-size of database. Index Terms—Content-based image retrieval, long-term learning, reinforcement learning, relevance feedback, short-term learning.