Social Neighborhood Graph and Multigraph Fusion Ranking for Multifeature Image Retrieval

A single feature is hard to describe the content of images from an overall perspective, which limits the retrieval performances of single-feature-based methods in image retrieval tasks. To fully describe the properties of images and improve the retrieval performances, multifeature fusion ranking-based methods are proposed. However, the effectiveness of multifeature fusion in image retrieval has not been theoretically explained. This article gives a theoretical proof to illustrate the role of independent features in improving the retrieval results. Based on the theoretical proof, the original ranking list generated with a single feature greatly influences the performances of multifeature fusion ranking. Inspired by the principle of three degrees of influence in social networks, this article proposes a reranking method named $k$ -nearest neighbors’ neighbors’ neighbors’ graph (N3G) to improve the original ranking list by a single feature. Furthermore, a multigraph fusion ranking (MFR) method motivated by the group relation theory in social networks for multifeature ranking is also proposed, which considers the correlations of all images in multiple neighborhood graphs. Evaluation experiments conducted on several representative data sets (e.g., UK-bench, Holiday, Corel-10K, and Cifar-10) validate that N3G and MFR outperform the other state-of-the-art methods.