Query-by-visual-search: multimodal framework for content-based image retrieval

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) states the procedure of recovering images having similar visual content against a query image from image datasets. In CBIR, the selection of redundant and irrelevant features from images results in the semantic gap issue, which occurs during feature representation and machine learning process. The robust image representation for effective and efficient image retrieval mainly depends upon robust feature selection and classification, which also reduces the semantic gap problem of CBIR. This paper proposed an innovative method for effective and efficient CBIR. The method uses sparse complementary features for vigorous image representation, optimal feature selection based on locality-preserving projection, fuzzy c-means clustering, and soft label support vector machine for robust image classification. In CBIR, smaller and larger sizes of codebook improve the recall and precision (accuracy) of the system, respectively. Due to this reason, the proposed method introduces complementary features based on a larger size codebook, which is assembled using two small sizes of codebooks to increase CBIR performance. The three well-known image datasets (i.e. Corel-1000, Corel-1500, and Holidays) are used to assess the performance of the proposed method. The experimental evaluation highlights promising results as compared to recent methods of CBIR.