Sparse semantic metric learning for image retrieval

Typical content-based image retrieval solutions usually cannot achieve satisfactory performance due to the semantic gap challenge. With the popularity of social media applications, large amounts of social images associated with user tagging information are available, which can be leveraged to boost image retrieval. In this paper, we propose a sparse semantic metric learning (SSML) algorithm by discovering knowledge from these social media resources, and apply the learned metric to search relevant images for users. Different from the traditional metric learning approaches that use similar or dissimilar constraints over a homogeneous visual space, the proposed method exploits heterogeneous information from two views of images and formulates the learning problem with the following principles. The semantic structure in the text space is expected to be preserved for the transformed space. To prevent overfitting the noisy, incomplete, or subjective tagging information of images, we expect that the mapping space by the learned metric does not deviate from the original visual space. In addition, the metric is straightforward constrained to be row-wise sparse with the ℓ_2,1-norm to suppress certain noisy or redundant visual feature dimensions. We present an iterative algorithm with proved convergence to solve the optimization problem. With the learned metric for image retrieval, we conduct extensive experiments on a real-world dataset and validate the effectiveness of our approach compared with other related work.