Fuzzy aggregation operators in region-based image retrieval
Zoran Stejić, Yasufumi Takama, Kaoru Hirota · 2005
We examine the effect of the fuzzy aggregation operators on the image retrieval performance, by empirically comparing 67 operators, applied to the problem of computing the image similarity, given a collection of feature similarities of the image regions. While majority of the existing image similarity models express the image similarity as an aggregation of feature similarities, no study presents a systematic comparison of the different operators. We compare the 67 operators by: (1) incorporating each operator into a hierarchical, region-based similarity model, which expresses the image similarity as an aggregation of region similarities, and each region similarity as an aggregation of the corresponding feature similarities; and (2) evaluating the obtained model(s) on five test databases, containing 64,339 general-purpose images, in 749 semantic categories. Results show that the retrieval performance strongly depends on the operator(s) incorporated in the similarity model - the difference in the average retrieval precision between the best and the worst performing of the 67 operators is up to 50%.