Linguistic Patterns and Cross Modality-based Image Retrieval for Complex Queries

With the rising prevalence of social media, coupled with the ease of sharing images, people with specific needs and applications such as known item search, multimedia question answering, etc., have started searching for visual content, which is expressed in terms of complex queries. A complex query consists of multiple concepts and their attributes are arranged to convey semantics. It is less effective to answer such queries by simply appending the search results gathered from individual or subsets of concepts present in the query. In this paper, we propose to exploit the query constituents and relationships among them. The proposed approach finds image-query relevance by integrating three models - the linguistic pattern-based textual model, the visual model, and the cross modality model. We extract linguistic patterns from complex queries, gather their related crawled images, and assign relevance scores to images in the corpus. The relevance scores are then used to rank the images. We experiment on more than 140k images and compare the NDCG@n scores with the state-of-the-art image ranking methods for complex queries. Also, ranking of images obtained by our approach outperforms than that of obtained by a popular search engine.