Content-Based Image Retrieval using Support Vector Machine and Clustering

Subject Areas : International Journal of Data Envelopment Analysis

Mohammad M. AlyanNezhadi ^{1 *} , Ahmad Kamandi ² , Fatemeh Ahangar Darabi ³ , Hesamoddin Pourrostami ⁴ , Seyyed Mohammad R. Hashemi ⁵

1 - گروه علوم کامپیوتر، دانشگاه علم و فناوری مازندران، بهشهر، ایران
2 - Department of Mathematics, University of Science and Technology of Mazandaran, Iran
3 - Department of Mathematics, University of Science and Technology of Mazandaran, Behshahr, Iran
4 - Department of Information Management, International Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Douliu, Taiwan
5 - گروه مهندسی کامپیوتر و فناوری اطلاعات، دانشگاه صنعتی شاهرود، شاهرود، ایران.

Received: 2025-08-20 Accepted : 2025-10-05 Published : 2025-07-04

Keywords: Content-based image retrieval, clustering, Support vector machines, classification, k-means, ResNet50,

Abstract :

Accurate content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is critical for applications ranging from large-scale digital libraries to real-time mobile search, yet many high-precision methods suffer from prohibitive query-time costs as database sizes grow. To address this challenge, we introduce a scalable two-stage retrieval framework that balances accuracy with efficiency. First, we extract deep convolutional features from all images using a pre-trained ResNet50 model and partition the feature space into semantically coherent clusters via K-means. During retrieval, an incoming query image undergoes feature extraction and is quickly assigned to the most relevant cluster using a directed acyclic graph support vector machine classifier. Within the selected cluster, we perform fine-grained similarity ranking to produce the final set of retrieved images. We validate our approach on the Corel-10k dataset, demonstrating that our method achieves a recall of 0.91 and a precision of 0.93, while reducing average query time by 45% compared to a non-clustered baseline. Ablation studies reveal the impact of cluster granularity and classifier choice on retrieval performance. The proposed framework offers an effective solution for large-scale CBIR, maintaining high retrieval precision with substantially lower latency.

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