Ball Ranking Machine for Content-Based Multimedia Retrieval

In this paper, we propose the new Ball Ranking Machines (BRMs) to address the supervised ranking problems. In previous work, supervised ranking methods have been successfully applied in various information retrieval tasks. Among these methodologies, the Ranking Support Vector Machines (Rank SVMs) are well investigated. However, one major fact limiting their applications is that Ranking SVMs need optimize a margin-based objective function over all possible document pairs within all queries on the training set. In consequence, Ranking SVMs need select a large number of support vectors among a huge number of support vector candidates. This paper introduces a new model of of Ranking SVMs and develops an efficient approximation algorithm, which decreases the training time and generates much fewer support vectors. Empirical studies on synthetic data and content-based image/video retrieval data show that our method is comparable to Ranking SVMs in accuracy, but use much fewer ranking support vectors and significantly less training time.