Attribute-Augmented Semantic Hierarchy

This article presents a novel attribute-augmented semantic hierarchy (A 2 SH) and demonstrates its effectiveness in bridging both the semantic and intention gaps in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). A 2 SH organizes semantic concepts into multiple semantic levels and augments each concept with a set of related attributes. The attributes are used to describe the multiple facets of the concept and act as the intermediate bridge connecting the concept and low-level visual content. An hierarchical semantic similarity function is learned to characterize the semantic similarities among images for retrieval. To better capture user search intent, a hybrid feedback mechanism is developed, which collects hybrid feedback on attributes and images. This feedback is then used to refine the search results based on A 2 SH. We use A 2 SH as a basis to develop a unified content-based image retrieval system. We conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale dataset of over one million Web images. Experimental results show that the proposed A 2 SH can characterize the semantic affinities among images accurately and can shape user search intent quickly, leading to more accurate search results as compared to state-of-the-art CBIR solutions.