Efficient image and tag co-ranking: a Bregman divergence optimization method

Abstract

Ranking on image search has attracted considerable attentions. Many graph-based algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem. Despite their remarkable success, these approaches are restricted to their separated image networks. To improve the ranking performance, one effective strategy is to work beyond the separated image graph by leveraging fruitful information from manual semantic labeling (i.e., tags) associated with images, which leads to the technique of co-ranking images and tags, a representative method that aims to explore the reinforcing relationship between image and tag graphs. The idea of co-ranking is implemented by adopting the paradigm of random walks. However, there are two problems hidden in co-ranking remained to be open: the high computational complexity and the problem of out-of-sample. To address the challenges above, in this paper, we cast the co-ranking process into a Bregman divergence optimization framework under which we transform the original random walk into an equivalent optimal kernel matrix learning problem. Enhanced by this new formulation, we derive a novel extension to achieve a better performance for both in-sample and out-of-sample cases. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.