APEX: an adaptive visual information retrieval system

Given a user's visual query, most visual information retrieval (VIR) systems rank the images in the database according to a predefined measure of similarity and return the most similar ones. We propose an adaptive VIR system that uses a retrieval process based on relevance feedback in order to learn the similarity criterion from the user. Our system is based on a structured representation of the image which is then processed by a recursive neural network. The search algorithm refines its response trying to minimize the number of steps required to find the target image.