We present a novel compact image descriptor for large scale image search. Our proposed descriptor - Geometric VLAD (gVLAD) is an extension of VLAD (Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors) that incorporates weak geometry information into the VLAD framework. The proposed geometry cues are derived as a membership function over keypoint angles which contain evident and informative information but yet often discarded. A principled technique for learning the membership function by clustering angles is also presented. Further, to address the overhead of iterative codebook training over real-time datasets, a novel codebook adaptation strategy is outlined. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of proposed gVLAD based retrieval framework where we achieve more than 15 improvement in mAP over existing benchmarks.
However, most of existing methods ignore the geometric information present in images. Spatial re-ranking @cite_10 is usually used as a geometric filter to remove unrelated images from retrieval results. However, due to its expensive computation it is applied only to top ranked images for re-ranking. The spatial pyramid @cite_12 is a simple extension of the BOW representation which partitions the image into increasingly fine sub-regions and computes histograms of local features found inside each sub-region. It shows improved performance on scene classification tasks. The weak geometric consistency constraints (WGC) @cite_9 uses angle and scale information from key points to verify the consistency of matching descriptors. It can improve the retrieval performance significantly. Recently, Zhang . @cite_6 propose a technique to encode more spatial information through the geometry-preserving visual phrases (GVP) which requires a pair of images to obtain geometric information. Chum . @cite_8 propose geometric min-hash, which extends min-hash by adding local spatial extent to increase the discriminability of the descriptor. It can be used for nearly duplicate image detection but has not achieved the state-of-the art performance in retrieval.
@cite_8 @cite_9 @cite_6 @cite_10 @cite_12
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We propose a novel hashing scheme for image retrieval, clustering and automatic object discovery. Unlike commonly used bag-of-words approaches, the spatial extent of image features is exploited in our method. The geometric information is used both to construct repeatable hash keys and to increase the discriminability of the description. Each hash key combines visual appearance (visual words) with semi-local geometric information. Compared with the state-of-the-art min-hash, the proposed method has both higher recall (probability of collision for hashes on the same object) and lower false positive rates (random collisions). The advantages of geometric min-hashing approach are most pronounced in the presence of viewpoint and scale change, significant occlusion or small physical overlap of the viewing fields. We demonstrate the power of the proposed method on small object discovery in a large unordered collection of images and on a large scale image clustering problem. This paper improves recent methods for large scale image search. State-of-the-art methods build on the bag-of-features image representation. We, first, analyze bag-of-features in the framework of approximate nearest neighbor search. This shows the sub-optimality of such a representation for matching descriptors and leads us to derive a more precise representation based on 1) Hamming embedding (HE) and 2) weak geometric consistency constraints (WGC). HE provides binary signatures that refine the matching based on visual words. WGC filters matching descriptors that are not consistent in terms of angle and scale. HE and WGC are integrated within the inverted file and are efficiently exploited for all images, even in the case of very large datasets. Experiments performed on a dataset of one million of images show a significant improvement due to the binary signature and the weak geometric consistency constraints, as well as their efficiency. Estimation of the full geometric transformation, i.e., a re-ranking step on a short list of images, is complementary to our weak geometric consistency constraints and allows to further improve the accuracy. State of the art methods for image and object retrieval exploit both appearance (via visual words) and local geometry (spatial extent, relative pose). In large scale problems, memory becomes a limiting factor - local geometry is stored for each feature detected in each image and requires storage larger than the inverted file and term frequency and inverted document frequency weights together. We propose a novel method for learning discretized local geometry representation based on minimization of average reprojection error in the space of ellipses. The representation requires only 24 bits per feature without drop in performance. Additionally, we show that if the gravity vector assumption is used consistently from the feature description to spatial verification, it improves retrieval performance and decreases the memory footprint. The proposed method outperforms state of the art retrieval algorithms in a standard image retrieval benchmark. In this paper, we present a large-scale object retrieval system. The user supplies a query object by selecting a region of a query image, and the system returns a ranked list of images that contain the same object, retrieved from a large corpus. We demonstrate the scalability and performance of our system on a dataset of over 1 million images crawled from the photo-sharing site, Flickr [3], using Oxford landmarks as queries. Building an image-feature vocabulary is a major time and performance bottleneck, due to the size of our dataset. To address this problem we compare different scalable methods for building a vocabulary and introduce a novel quantization method based on randomized trees which we show outperforms the current state-of-the-art on an extensive ground-truth. Our experiments show that the quantization has a major effect on retrieval quality. To further improve query performance, we add an efficient spatial verification stage to re-rank the results returned from our bag-of-words model and show that this consistently improves search quality, though by less of a margin when the visual vocabulary is large. We view this work as a promising step towards much larger, "web-scale " image corpora. This paper presents a method for recognizing scene categories based on approximate global geometric correspondence. This technique works by partitioning the image into increasingly fine sub-regions and computing histograms of local features found inside each sub-region. The resulting "spatial pyramid" is a simple and computationally efficient extension of an orderless bag-of-features image representation, and it shows significantly improved performance on challenging scene categorization tasks. Specifically, our proposed method exceeds the state of the art on the Caltech-101 database and achieves high accuracy on a large database of fifteen natural scene categories. The spatial pyramid framework also offers insights into the success of several recently proposed image descriptions, including Torralbas "gist" and Lowes SIFT descriptors.