WhittleSearch: Image search with relative attribute feedback

We propose a novel mode of feedback for image search, where a user describes which properties of exemplar images should be adjusted in order to more closely match his/her mental model of the image(s) sought. For example, perusing image results for a query “black shoes”, the user might state, “Show me shoe images like these, but sportier.” Offline, our approach first learns a set of ranking functions, each of which predicts the relative strength of a nameable attribute in an image (‘sportiness’, ‘furriness’, etc.). At query time, the system presents an initial set of reference images, and the user selects among them to provide relative attribute feedback. Using the resulting constraints in the multi-dimensional attribute space, our method updates its relevance function and re-ranks the pool of images. This procedure iterates using the accumulated constraints until the top ranked images are acceptably close to the user’s envisioned target. In this way, our approach a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Adriana Kovashka, Devi Parikh, Kristen Grauman
• Keywords: Computer Vision, Cvpr 2012, Relevance Feedback, Shoe Images, Visual Feature