Integrating Visual Saliency and Consistency for Re-Ranking Image Search Results

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for image re-ranking in web image search applications. The proposed method focuses on investigating the following two mechanisms: 1) Visual consistency. In most web image search cases, the images that closely related to the search query are visually similar. These visually consistent images which occur most frequently in the first few web pages will be given higher ranks. 2) Visual saliency. From visual aspect, it is obvious that salient images would be easier to catch users’ eyes, and it is observed that these visually salient images in the front pages are often relevant to the user’s query. By integrating the above two mechanisms, our method can efficiently re-rank the images from search engines and obtain a more satisfactory search result. Experimental results on a real-world web image dataset demonstrate that our approach can effectively improve the performance of image retrieval.