Abstract. 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 suboptimality 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. 1

nearest-neighbors search, randomized kd-trees, hierarchical k-means tree, clustering. For many computer vision problems, the most time consuming component consists of nearest neighbor matching in high-dimensional spaces. There are no known exact algorithms for solving these high-dimensional problems that are faster than linear search. Approximate algorithms are known to provide large speedups with only minor loss in accuracy, but many such algorithms have been published with only minimal guidance on selecting an algorithm and its parameters for any given problem. In this paper, we describe a system that answers the question, “What is the fastest approximate nearest-neighbor algorithm for my data? ” Our system will take any given dataset and desired degree of precision and use these to automatically determine the best algorithm and parameter values. We also describe a new algorithm that applies priority search on hierarchical k-means trees, which we have found to provide the best known performance on many datasets. After testing a range of alternatives, we have found that multiple randomized k-d trees provide the best performance for other datasets. We are releasing public domain code that implements these approaches. This library provides about one order of magnitude improvement in query time over the best previously available software and provides fully automated parameter selection. 1

Given a query image of an object, our objective is to retrieve all instances of that object in a large (1M+) image database. We adopt the bag-of-visual-words architecture which has proven successful in achieving high precision at low recall. Unfortunately, feature detection and quantization are noisy processes and this can result in variation in the particular visual words that appear in different images of the same object, leading to missed results. In the text retrieval literature a standard method for improving performance is query expansion. A number of the highly ranked documents from the original query are reissued as a new query. In this way, additional relevant terms can be added to the query. This is a form of blind relevance feedback and it can fail if ‘outlier ’ (false positive) documents are included in the reissued query. In this paper we bring query expansion into the visual domain via two novel contributions. Firstly, strong spatial constraints between the query image and each result allow us to accurately verify each return, suppressing the false positives which typically ruin text-based query expansion. Secondly, the verified images can be used to learn a latent feature model to enable the controlled construction of expanded queries. We illustrate these ideas on the 5000 annotated image Oxford building database together with more than 1M Flickr images. We show that the precision is substantially boosted, achieving total recall in many cases. 1.

The state of the art in visual object retrieval from large databases is achieved by systems that are inspired by text retrieval. A key component of these approaches is that local regions of images are characterized using high-dimensional descriptors which are then mapped to “visual words ” selected from a discrete vocabulary. This paper explores techniques to map each visual region to a weighted set of words, allowing the inclusion of features which were lost in the quantization stage of previous systems. The set of visual words is obtained by selecting words based on proximity in descriptor space. We describe how this representation may be incorporated into a standard tf-idf architecture, and how spatial verification is modified in the case of this soft-assignment. We evaluate our method on the standard Oxford Buildings dataset, and introduce a new dataset for evaluation. Our results exceed the current state of the art retrieval performance on these datasets, particularly on queries with poor initial recall where techniques like query expansion suffer. Overall we show that soft-assignment is always beneficial for retrieval with large vocabularies, at a cost of increased storage requirements for the index. 1.

We have built an outdoors augmented reality system for mobile phones that matches camera-phone images against a large database of location-tagged images using a robust image retrieval algorithm. We avoid network latency by implementing the algorithm on the phone and deliver excellent performance by adapting a state-ofthe-art image retrieval algorithm based on robust local descriptors. Matching is performed against a database of highly relevant features, which is continuously updated to reflect changes in the environment. We achieve fast updates and scalability by pruning of irrelevant features based on proximity to the user. By compressing and incrementally updating the features stored on the phone we make the system amenable to low-bandwidth wireless connections. We demonstrate system robustness on a dataset of location-tagged images and show a smart-phone implementation that achieves a high image matching rate while operating in near real-time.

This paper proposes two novel image similarity measures for fast indexing via locality sensitive hashing. The similarity measures are applied and evaluated in the context of near duplicate image detection. The proposed method uses a visual vocabulary of vector quantized local feature descriptors (SIFT) and for retrieval exploits enhanced min-Hash techniques. Standard min-Hash uses an approximate set intersection between document descriptors was used as a similarity measure. We propose an efficient way of exploiting more sophisticated similarity measures that have proven to be essential in image / particular object retrieval. The proposed similarity measures do not require extra computational effort compared to the original measure. We focus primarily on scalability to very large image and video databases, where fast query processing is necessary. The method requires only a small amount of data need be stored for each image. We demonstrate our method on the TrecVid 2006 data set which contains approximately 146K key frames, and also on challenging the University of Kentucky image retrieval database. 1

In this paper, we describe an approach for mining images of objects (such as touristic sights) from community photo collections in an unsupervised fashion. Our approach relies on retrieving geotagged photos from those web-sites using a grid of geospatial tiles. The downloaded photos are clustered into potentially interesting entities through a processing pipeline of several modalities, including visual, textual and spatial proximity. The resulting clusters are analyzed and are automatically classified into objects and events. Using mining techniques, we then find text labels for these clusters, which are used to again assign each cluster to a corresponding Wikipedia article in a fully unsupervised manner. A final verification step uses the contents (including images) from the selected Wikipedia article to verify the cluster-article assignment. We demonstrate this approach on several urban areas, densely covering an area of over 700 square kilometers and mining over 200,000 photos, making it probably the largest experiment of its kind to date.

This article improves recent methods for large scale image search. We first analyze the bag-of-features approach in the framework of approximate nearest neighbor search. This 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 an inverted file and are efficiently exploited for all images in the dataset. We then introduce a graph-structured quantizer which significantly speeds up the assignment of the descriptors to visual words. A comparison with the state of the art shows the interest of our approach when high accuracy is needed. Experiments performed on three reference datasets and 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 reranking step on a short-list of images, is shown to be complementary to our weak geometric consistency constraints. Our approach is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art on the three datasets. 1

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.

One of the main limitations of image search based on bag-of-features is the memory usage per image. Only a few million images can be handled on a single machine in reasonable response time. In this paper, we first evaluate how the memory usage is reduced by using lossless index compression. We then propose an approximate representation of bag-of-features obtained by projecting the corresponding histogram onto a set of pre-defined sparse projection functions, producing several image descriptors. Coupled with a proper indexing structure, an image is represented by a few hundred bytes. A distance expectation criterion is then used to rank the images. Our method is at least one order of magnitude faster than standard bag-of-features while providing excellent search quality. 1.