  Visual reranking is effective to improve the performance of the text-based
video search. However, existing reranking algorithms can only achieve limited
improvement because of the well-known semantic gap between low level visual
features and high level semantic concepts. In this paper, we adopt interactive
video search reranking to bridge the semantic gap by introducing user's
labeling effort. We propose a novel dimension reduction tool, termed sparse
transfer learning (STL), to effectively and efficiently encode user's labeling
information. STL is particularly designed for interactive video search
reranking. Technically, it a) considers the pair-wise discriminative
information to maximally separate labeled query relevant samples from labeled
query irrelevant ones, b) achieves a sparse representation for the subspace to
encodes user's intention by applying the elastic net penalty, and c) propagates
user's labeling information from labeled samples to unlabeled samples by using
the data distribution knowledge. We conducted extensive experiments on the
TRECVID 2005, 2006 and 2007 benchmark datasets and compared STL with popular
dimension reduction algorithms. We report superior performance by using the
proposed STL based interactive video search reranking.
