Three Degree Binary Graph and Shortest Edge Clustering for re-ranking in multi-feature image retrieval

Graph methods have been widely employed in re-ranking for image retrieval. Although we can effectively find visually similar images through these methods, the ranking lists given by those approaches may contain some candidates which appear to be irrelevant to a query. Most of these candidates fall into two categories: (1) the irrelevant outliers located near to the query images in a graph; and (2) the images from another cluster which close to the query. Therefore, eliminating these two types of images from the ordered retrieval sets is expected to further boost the retrieval precision. In this paper, we build a Three Degree Binary Graph (TDBG) to eliminate the outliers and utilize a set-based greedy algorithm to reduce the influence of adjacent manifolds. Moreover, a multi-feature fusion method is proposed to enhance the retrieval performance further. Experimental results obtained on three public datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach.