We propose a data structure obtained by hierarchically averaging bag-of-word descriptors during a sequence of views that achieves average speedups in large-scale loop closure applications ranging from 4 to 20 times on benchmark datasets. Although simple, the method works as well as sophisticated agglomerative schemes at a fraction of the cost with minimal loss of performance.
For scalability, the most common choice is to combine quantized local descriptors into a bag-of-words and then use an inverted index. FAB-MAP @cite_47 extends the basic setup by learning a generative model of the visual words using a Chow-Liu tree to model the probability of co-occurrence of visual words. This allows calling a loop closure even when very few common features are observed while rejecting false matches which might be similar in appearance but generated by different locations. FAB-MAP 2.0 @cite_25 scales further by exploiting sparsity to make the inverted index retrieval architecture more efficient. Angeli al @cite_1 adopt Recursive Bayesian filtering with a simple voting scheme based on term frequency-inverted document frequency (tf-idf) @cite_9 @cite_46 @cite_37 . Starting from @cite_4 , SIFT or SURF descriptors were replaced by more efficient binary descriptors such as BRIEF @cite_18 and ORB @cite_39 to achieve comparable precision and recall to FAB-MAP 2.0 with an order of magnitude speed increase. Several recent mapping and localization systems adopt it as a module, including @cite_23 and ORB-SLAM @cite_6 . These also further incorporate ideas from graph optimization @cite_10 @cite_26 .
@cite_47 @cite_37 @cite_4 @cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_39 @cite_23 @cite_46 @cite_10 @cite_25
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Visual search and image retrieval underpin numerous applications, however the task is still challenging predominantly due to the variability of object appearance and ever increasing size of the databases, often exceeding billions of images. Prior art methods rely on aggregation of local scale-invariant descriptors, such as SIFT, via mechanisms including Bag of Visual Words (BoW), Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) and Fisher Vectors (FV). However, their performance is still short of what is required. This paper presents a novel method for deriving a compact and distinctive representation of image content called Robust Visual Descriptor with Whitening (RVD-W). It significantly advances the state of the art and delivers world-class performance. In our approach local descriptors are rank-assigned to multiple clusters. Residual vectors are then computed in each cluster, normalized using a direction-preserving normalization function and aggregated based on the neighborhood rank. Importantly, the residual vectors are de-correlated and whitened in each cluster before aggregation, leading to a balanced energy distribution in each dimension and significantly improved performance. We also propose a new post-PCA normalization approach which improves separability between the matching and non-matching global descriptors. This new normalization benefits not only our RVD-W descriptor but also improves existing approaches based on FV and VLAD aggregation. Furthermore, we show that the aggregation framework developed using hand-crafted SIFT features also performs exceptionally well with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based features. The RVD-W pipeline outperforms state-of-the-art global descriptors on both the Holidays and Oxford datasets. On the large scale datasets, Holidays1M and Oxford1M, SIFT-based RVD-W representation obtains a mAP of 45.1 and 35.1 percent, while CNN-based RVD-W achieve a mAP of 63.5 and 44.8 percent, all yielding superior performance to the state-of-the-art. We describe a new formulation of appearance-only SLAM suitable for very large scale place recognition. The system navigates in the space of appearance, assigning each new observation to either a new or a previously visited location, without reference to metric position. The system is demonstrated performing reliable online appearance mapping and loop-closure detection over a 1000âkm trajectory, with mean filter update times of 14âms. The scalability of the system is achieved by defining a sparse approximation to the FAB-MAP model suitable for implementation using an inverted index. Our formulation of the problem is fully probabilistic and naturally incorporates robustness against perceptual aliasing. We also demonstrate that the approach substantially outperforms the standard term-frequency inverse-document-frequency (tf-idf) ranking measure. The 1000âkm data set comprising almost a terabyte of omni-directional and stereo imagery is available for use, and we hope that it will serve as a benchmark for future systems. A novel probabilistic retrieval model is presented. It forms a basis to interpret the TF-IDF term weights as making relevance decisions. It simulates the local relevance decision-making for every location of a document, and combines all of these “local” relevance decisions as the “document-wide” relevance decision for the document. The significance of interpreting TF-IDF in this way is the potential to: (1) establish a unifying perspective about information retrieval as relevance decision-making; and (2) develop advanced TF-IDF-related term weights for future elaborate retrieval models. Our novel retrieval model is simplified to a basic ranking formula that directly corresponds to the TF-IDF term weights. In general, we show that the term-frequency factor of the ranking formula can be rendered into different term-frequency factors of existing retrieval systems. In the basic ranking formula, the remaining quantity - log p(rvt ∈ d) is interpreted as the probability of randomly picking a nonrelevant usage (denoted by r) of term t. Mathematically, we show that this quantity can be approximated by the inverse document-frequency (IDF). Empirically, we show that this quantity is related to IDF, using four reference TREC ad hoc retrieval data collections. The objective of this paper is large scale object instance retrieval, given a query image. A starting point of such systems is feature detection and description, for example using SIFT. The focus of this paper, however, is towards very large scale retrieval where, due to storage requirements, very compact image descriptors are required and no information about the original SIFT descriptors can be accessed directly at run time. We start from VLAD, the state-of-the art compact descriptor introduced by for this purpose, and make three novel contributions: first, we show that a simple change to the normalization method significantly improves retrieval performance, second, we show that vocabulary adaptation can substantially alleviate problems caused when images are added to the dataset after initial vocabulary learning. These two methods set a new state-of-the-art over all benchmarks investigated here for both mid-dimensional (20k-D to 30k-D) and small (128-D) descriptors. Our third contribution is a multiple spatial VLAD representation, MultiVLAD, that allows the retrieval and localization of objects that only extend over a small part of an image (again without requiring use of the original image SIFT descriptors).