A novel active learning method in relevance feedback for content-based remote sensing image retrieval

Conventional relevance feedback (RF) schemes improve the performance of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) requiring the user to annotate a large number of images. To reduce the labeling effort of the user, this paper presents a novel active learning (AL) method to drive RF for retrieving remote sensing images from large archives in the framework of the support vector machine classifier. The proposed AL method is specifically designed for CBIR and defines an effective and as small as possible set of relevant and irrelevant images with regard to a general query image by jointly evaluating three criteria: 1) uncertainty; 2) diversity; and 3) density of images in the archive. The uncertainty and diversity criteria aim at selecting the most informative images in the archive, whereas the density criterion goal is to choose the images that are representative of the underlying distribution of data in the archive. The proposed AL method assesses jointly the three criteria based on two successive steps. In the first step, the most uncertain (i.e., ambiguous) images are selected from the archive on the basis of the margin sampling strategy. In the second step, the images that are both diverse (i.e., distant) to each other and associated to the high-density regions of the image feature space in the archive are chosen from the most uncertain images. This step is achieved by a novel clustering-based strategy. The proposed AL method for driving the RF contributes to mitigate problems of unbalanced and biased set of relevant and irrelevant images. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed AL method.