Distance-based multiple paths quantization of vocabulary tree for object and scene retrieval

The state of the art in image retrieval on large scale databases is achieved by the work inspired by the text retrieval approaches. A key step of these methods is the quantization stage which maps the high-dimensional feature vectors to discriminatory visual words. This paper mainly proposes a distance-based multiple paths quantization (DMPQ) algorithm to reduce the quantization loss of the vocabulary tree based methods. In addition, a more efficient way to build a vocabulary tree is presented by using sub-vectors of features. The algorithm is evaluated on both the benchmark object recognition and the location recognition databases. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve image retrieval performance of the vocabulary tree based methods on both the databases.