Knowing a tree from the forest: Art image retrieval using a society of profiles

This paper aims to address the problem of art image retrieval (AIR), which aims to help users find their favorite painting images. AIR is of great interests to us because of its application potentials and interesting research challenges - the retrieval is not only based on painting contents or styles, but also heavily based on user preference profiles. This paper describes the collaborative ensemble learning, a novel statistical learning approach to this task. It at first applies probabilistic support vector machines (SVMs) to model each individual user's profile based on given examples, i.e. liked or disliked paintings. Due to the high complexity of profile modelling, the SVMs can be rather weak in predicting preferences for new paintings. To overcome this problem, we combine a society of users' profiles, represented by their respective SVM models, to predict a given user's preferences for painting images. We demonstrate that the combination scheme is embedded in a Bayesian framework and retains intuitive interpretations - like-minded users are likely to share similar preferences. We report extensive empirical studies based on two experimental settings. The first one includes some controlled simulations performed on 4533 painting images. In the second setting, we report evaluations based on user preferences collected through an online web-based survey. Both experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves excellent performance in terms of capturing a user's diverse preferences.