Image recommendation based on a novel biologically inspired hierarchical model

Image recommendation has become an increasingly relevant problem recently, since strong demand to quickly find interested images from vast amounts of image library. We describe a biologically inspired hierarchical model for image recommendation. The biologically inspired model (BIM) for invariant feature representation has attracted widespread attention, which approximately follows the organization of cortex visuel. BIM is a computation architecture with four layers. With the image data size increases, the four-layer framework is prone to be overfitting, which limits its application. To address this issue, we propose a biologically inspired hierarchical model (BIHM) for feature representation, which adds two more discriminative layers upon the conventional four-layer framework. In contrast to the conventional BIM that mimics the inferior temporal cortex, which corresponds to the low level feature, the proposed BIHM adds two more layers upon the conventional framework to simulate inferotemporal cortex, exploring higher level feature invariance and selectivity. Furthermore, we firstly utilize the BIHM in the image recommendation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed model, we use it to image classification and retrieval tasks and perform experiments on CalTech5, Imagenet and CalTech256 datasets. The experiment results show that BIHM exhibits better performance than the conventional model in the tasks and is very comparable to existing architectures.