Aggregating Neighbor Embedding Projection and Rank-Based Manifold Learning for Image Retrieval

2026-09-01

AI Summary

为解决高维特征空间中图像检索的精度问题，提出了一种结合邻居嵌入投影和基于排序的流形学习的方法，通过UMAP生成低维表示并用Borda计数聚合排名。

Abstract

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has advanced significantly with deep learning, yet effectively ranking similar images remains challenging, particularly in high-dimensional feature spaces, where pairwise distances often fail to capture contextual relationships and the semantic gap between visual features and high-level concepts persists. Manifold learning and rank-based refinement methods have emerged as complementary strategies, respectively improving feature representations and exploiting contextual information embedded in ranked lists, such as neighborhood relationships among images. However, combining these projection-based and rank-based strategies to exploit their complementary properties remains a challenging research problem. To address this, we propose a framework that combines neighbor embedding projections with rank-based manifold learning through rank aggregation. Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) generates alternative low-dimensional feature representations, and ranked lists obtained from UMAP projections and rank-based re-ranking methods are combined using the Borda Count aggregation strategy. Experiments were conducted on several public datasets using deep learning features extracted from ResNet152, Swin Transformer, and DINOv2 models. Results show that the proposed approach improves retrieval effectiveness in several scenarios, particularly when the baseline representation struggles to achieve high precision. The aggregation strategy also often improves the quality of top-ranked positions, leading to competitive Mean Average Precision (MAP) and Precision values across different datasets and feature extractors. These findings suggest that combining projection-based and rank-based manifold learning strategies through rank aggregation can provide complementary contextual information for image retrieval tasks.

Problem

• Content-based Image Retrieval
• High-dimensional Feature Spaces
• Manifold Learning
• Rank-based Refinement
• Semantic Gap

Innovation

• Neighbor Embedding
• Rank-based Manifold Learning
• Borda Count
• UMAP
• Image Retrieval