Multilayer pLSA for Multimodal Image Retrieval

It is current state of knowledge that our neocortex consists of six layers [10]. We take this knowledge from neuroscience as an inspiration to extend the standard single-layer probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA) [13] to multiple layers. As multiple layers should naturally handle multiple modalities and a hierarchy of abstractions, we denote this new approach multilayer multimodal probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (mm-pLSA). We derive the training and inference rules for the smallest possible non-degenerated mm-pLSA model: a model with two leaf-pLSAs (here from two different data modalities: image tags and visual image features) and a single top-level pLSA node merging the two leaf-pLSAs. From this derivation it is obvious how to extend the learning and inference rules to more modalities and more layers. We also propose a fast and strictly stepwise forward procedure to initialize bottom-up the mm-pLSA model, which in turn can then be post-optimized by the general mm-pLSA learning algorithm. We evaluate the proposed approach experimentally in a query-by-example retrieval task using 50-dimensional topic vectors as image models. We compare various variants of our mm-pLSA system to systems relying solely on visual features or tag features and analyze possible pitfalls of the mm-pLSA training. It is shown that the best variant of the proposed mm-pLSA system outperforms the unimodal systems by approximately 19% in our query-by-example task