A novel image retrieval algorithm based on transfer learning and fusion features

With proliferation of social media, image has become ubiquitous giving rise to the demand and importance of image semantic analysis and retrieval to access information quickly on social media. However, even with humongous information available, there are certain categories of images which are important for certain applications but are very scarce. Convolutional neural network is an effective method to extract high-level semantic features for image database retrieval. To overcome the problem of over-fitting when the number of training samples in dataset is limited, this paper proposes an image database retrieval algorithm based on the framework of transfer learning and feature fusion. Based on the fine-tuning of the pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), the proposed algorithm first extracts the semantic features of the images. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is then applied for dimension reduction and to reduce the computational complexity. Last, the semantic feature extracted from the CNN is fused with traditional low-level visual feature to improve the retrieval accuracy further. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method for image database retrieval.