Object Retrieval with Large Vocabularies and Fast Spatial Matching

  • James Philbin ,
  • Michael Isard ,
  • Josef Sivic ,
  • Andrew Zisserman ,
  • Ondřej Chum

IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) |

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 bagof-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.