Combining local feature histograms of different granularities

Abstract

Histograms of local features have proven to be powerful representations in image category detection. Histograms with different numbers of bins encode the visual information with different granularities. In this paper we experimentally compare techniques for combining different granularities in a way that the resulting descriptors can be used as feature vectors in conventional vector space learning algorithms. In particular, we consider two main approaches: fusing the granularities on SVM kernel level and moving away from binary or hard to soft histograms. We find soft histograms to be a more effective approach, resulting in substantial performance improvement over single-granularity histograms. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.