Vocabulary Hierarchy Optimization for Effective and Transferable Retrieval

Scalable image retrieval systems usually involve hierarchical quantization of local image descriptors, which produces a visual vocabulary for inverted indexing of images. Although hierarchical quantization has the merit of retrieval efficiency, the resulting visual vocabulary representation usually...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rongrong Ji, Xing Xie, Hongxun Yao, Wei-ying Ma, Heilongjiang P. R
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Subjects:
DML
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.180.6387
http://vilab.hit.edu.cn/%7Errji/index_files/1184.pdf
Description
Summary:Scalable image retrieval systems usually involve hierarchical quantization of local image descriptors, which produces a visual vocabulary for inverted indexing of images. Although hierarchical quantization has the merit of retrieval efficiency, the resulting visual vocabulary representation usually faces two crucial problems: (1) hierarchical quantization errors and biases in the generation of “visual words"; (2) the model cannot adapt to database variance. In this paper, we describe an unsupervised optimization strategy in generating the hierarchy structure of visual vocabulary, which produces a more effective and adaptive retrieval model for large-scale search. We adopt a novel Density-based Metric Learning (DML) algorithm, which corrects word quantization bias without supervision in hierarchy optimization, based on which we present a hierarchical rejection chain for efficient online search based on the vocabulary hierarchy. We also discovered that by hierarchy optimization, efficient and effective transfer of a retrieval model across different databases is feasible. We deployed a large-scale image retrieval system using a vocabulary tree model to validate our advances. Experiments on UKBench and street-side urban scene databases demonstrated the effectiveness of our hierarchy optimization approach in comparison with state-of-the-art methods. 1.