Nearest Neighbor Search for Relevance Feedback

We introduce the problem of repetitive nearest neighbor search in relevance feedback and propose an efficient search scheme for high dimensional feature spaces. Relevance feedback learning is a popular scheme used in content based image and video retrieval to support high-level concept queries. This paper addresses those scenarios in which a similarity or distance matrix is updated during each iteration of the relevance feedback search and a new set of nearest neighbors is computed. This repetitive nearest neighbor computation in high dimensional feature spaces is expensive, particularly when the number of items in the data set is large. In this context, we suggest a search algorithm that supports relevance feedback for the general quadratic distance metric. The scheme exploits correlations between consecutive nearest neighbor sets thus significantly reducing the overall search complexity. Detailed experimental results are provided using 60 dimensional texture feature data set.