Diffusion Processes for Retrieval Revisited

In this paper we revisit diffusion processes on affinity graphs for capturing the intrinsic manifold structure defined by pairwise affinity matrices. Such diffusion processes have already proved the ability to significantly improve subsequent applications like retrieval. We give a thorough overview of the state-of-the-art in this field and discuss obvious similarities and differences. Based on our observations, we are then able to derive a generic framework for diffusion processes in the scope of retrieval applications, where the related work represents specific instances of our generic formulation. We evaluate our framework on several retrieval tasks and are able to derive algorithms that e. g. achieve a 100% bullseye score on the popular MPEG7 shape retrieval data set.