Concepts Learning with Fuzzy Clustering and Relevance Feedback

In recent years feedback approaches have been used in relating low-level image features with concepts to overcome the subjective nature of the human image interpretation. Generally, in these systems when the user starts with a new query, the entire prior experience of the system is lost. In this paper, we address the problem of incorporating prior experience of the retrieval system to improve the performance on future queries. We propose a semi-supervised fuzzy clustering method to learn class distribution (meta knowledge) in the sense of high-level concepts from retrieval experience. Using fuzzy rules, we incorporate the meta knowledge into a probabilistic feature relevance feedback approach to improve the retrieval performance. Results on synthetic and real databases show that our approach provides better retrieval precision compared to the case when no retrieval experience is used. r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.