Compact and Distinctive Visual Vocabularies for Efficient Multimedia Data Indexing

Abstract

Multimedia data indexing for content-based retrieval has attracted significant attention in recent years due to the commoditization of multimedia capturing equipment and the widespread adoption of social networking platforms as means for sharing media content online. Due to the very large amounts of multimedia content, notably images, produced and shared online by people, a very important requirement for multimedia indexing approaches pertains to their efficiency both in terms of computation and memory usage. A common approach to support query-by-example image search is based on the extraction of visual words from images and their indexing by means of inverted indices, a method proposed and popularized in the field of text retrieval.

The main challenge that visual word indexing systems currently face arises from the fact that it is necessary to build very large visual vocabularies (hundreds of thousands or even millions of words) to support sufficiently precise search. However, when the visual vocabulary is large, the image indexing process becomes computationally expensive due to the fact that the local image descriptors (e.g. SIFT) need to be quantized to the nearest visual words.

To this end, this paper proposes a novel method that significantly decreases the time required for the above quantization process. Instead of using hundreds of thousands of visual words for quantization, the proposed method manages to preserve retrieval quality by using a much smaller number of words for indexing. This is achieved by the concept of composite words, i.e. assigning multiple words to a local descriptor in ascending order of distance. We evaluate the proposed method in the Oxford and Paris buildings datasets to demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach.