Adaptive and optimal combination of local features for image retrieval

Abstract

With the large number of local feature detectors and descriptors in the literature of Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), in this work we propose a solution to predict the optimal combination of features, for improving image retrieval performances, based on the spatial complementarity of interest point detectors. We review several complementarity criteria of detectors and employ them in a regression based prediction model, designed to select the suitable detectors combination for a dataset. The proposal can improve retrieval performance even more by selecting optimal combination for each image (and not only globally for the dataset), as well as being profitable in the optimal fitting of some parameters. The proposal is appraised on three state-of-theart datasets to validate its effectiveness and stability. The experimental results highlight the importance of spatial complementarity of the features to improve retrieval, and prove the advantage of using this model to optimally adapt detectors combination and some parameters.