This paper describes a new method for active learning in content-based image retrieval. The proposed method firstly uses support vector machine (SVM) classifiers to learn an initial query concept. Then the proposed active learning scheme employs similarity measure to check the current version space and selects images with maximum expected information gain to solicit user's label. Finally, the learned query is refined based on the user's further feedback. With the combination of SVM classifier and similarity measure, the proposed method can alleviate model bias existing in each of them. Our experiments on several query concepts show that the proposed method can learn the user's query concept quickly and effectively only with several iterations.
