A unified model for accelerating unsupervised iterative re-ranking algorithms

Despite the continuous advances in image retrieval technologies, performing effective and efficient content-based searches remains a challenging task. Unsupervised iterative re-ranking algorithms have emerged as a promising solution and have been widely used to improve the effectiveness of multimedia retrieval systems. Although substantially more efficient than related approaches based on diffusion processes, these re-ranking algorithms can still be computationally costly, demanding the specification and implementation of efficient big multimedia analysis approaches. Such demand associated with the significant potential for parallelization and highly effective results achieved by recently proposed re-ranking algorithms creates the need for exploiting efficiency vs effectiveness trade-offs. In this article, we introduce a class of unsupervised iterative re-ranking algorithms and present a model that can be used to guide their implementation and optimization for parallel architectures. We also analyze the impact of the parallelization on the performance of four algorithms that belong to the proposed class: Contextual Spaces, RL-Sim, Contextual Re-ranking, and Cartesian Product of Ranking References. The experiments show speedups that reach up to 6.0x, 16.1x, 3.3x, and 7.1x for each algorithm, respectively. These results demonstrate that the proposed parallel programming model can be successfully applied to various algorithms and used to improve the performance of multimedia retrieval systems.