Visual Reranking through Weakly Supervised Multi-Graph Learning

Visual reranking has been widely deployed to refine the quality of conventional content-based image retrieval engines. The current trend lies in employing a crowd of retrieved results stemming from multiple feature modalities to boost the overall performance of visual reranking. However, a major challenge pertaining to current reranking methods is how to take full advantage of the complementary property of distinct feature modalities. Given a query image and one feature modality, a regular visual reranking framework treats the top-ranked images as pseudo positive instances which are inevitably noisy, difficult to reveal this complementary property, and thus lead to inferior ranking performance. This paper proposes a novel image reranking approach by introducing a Co-Regularized Multi-Graph Learning (Co-RMGL) framework, in which the intra-graph and inter-graph constraints are simultaneously imposed to encode affinities in a single graph and consistency across different graphs. Moreover, weakly supervised learning driven by image attributes is performed to denoise the pseudolabeled instances, thereby highlighting the unique strength of individual feature modality. Meanwhile, such learning can yield a few anchors in graphs that vitally enable the alignment and fusion of multiple graphs. As a result, an edge weight matrix learned from the fused graph automatically gives the ordering to the initially retrieved results. We evaluate our approach on four benchmark image retrieval datasets, demonstrating a significant performance gain over the state-of-the-arts.