Kernel gbda for relevance feedback in image retrieval

Relevance feedback, as a user-in-the-loop mechanism, has been widely employed to improve the performance of content-based image retrieval. Generally, in a relevance feedback algorithm, two key components are: (1) how to select a subset of effective features from a large-scale feature pool and, (2) correspondingly, how to construct a suitable dissimilarity measure. In previous work, the biased discriminant analysis (BDA) has been proposed to address these two problems during the feedback iterations. However, BDA encounters the so called small samples size problem because it has a lack of training samples. In this paper, we utilize the generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD) to significantly reduce the small samples size problem in BDA. The developed algorithm is named GSVD for BDA (GBDA). We then kernelize the GBDA to nonlinear kernel feature space. A large amount of experiments were carried out upon a large scale database, which contains 17800 images. From the experimental results, GBDA and its kernelization are demonstrated to outperform the traditional BDA-based relevance feedback approaches and their kernel extensions, respectively.