Abstract

In content-based image retrieval, relevance feedback is an interactive process, which builds a bridge to connect users with a search engine. It leads to much improved retrieval performance by updating a query and similarity measures according to a user's preference; and recently techniques have matured to some extent. Most previous relevance feedback approaches exploit short-term learning (intraquery learning) that deals with the current feedback session but ignoring historical data from other users, which potentially results in a great loss of useful information. In the last few years, long-term learning (inter-query learning), by recording and collecting feedback knowledge from different users over a variety of query sessions has played an increasingly important role in multimedia information searching. It can further improve the retrieval performance in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. In the published literature, no comprehensive survey of both short-term learning and long-term learning RF techniques has been conducted. To this end, the goal of this chapter is to address this omission and offer suggestions for future work. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.