Reverse Image Search Using Deep Unsupervised Generative Learning and Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Reverse image search has been a vital and emerging research area of information retrieval. One of the primary research foci of information retrieval is to increase the space and computational efficiency by converting a large image database into an efficiently computed feature database. This paper proposes a novel deep learning-based methodology, which captures channel-wise, low-level details of each image. In the first phase, sparse auto-encoder (SAE), a deep generative model, is applied to RGB channels of each image for unsupervised representational learning. In the second phase, transfer learning is utilized by using VGG-16, a variant of deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The output of SAE combined with the original RGB channel is forwarded to VGG-16, thereby producing a more effective feature database by the ensemble/collaboration of two effective models. The proposed method provides an information rich feature space that is a reduced dimensionality representation of the image database. Experiments are performed on a hybrid dataset that is developed by combining three standard publicly available datasets. The proposed approach has a retrieval accuracy (precision) of 98.46%, without using the metadata of images, by using a cosine similarity measure between the query image and the image database. Additionally, to further validate the proposed methodology’s effectiveness, image quality has been degraded by adding 5% noise (Speckle, Gaussian, and Salt pepper noise types) in the hybrid dataset. Retrieval accuracy has generally been found to be 97% for different variants of noise.