An Efficient Index for Visual Search in Appearance-based SLAM

Vector-quantization can be a computationally expensive step in visual bag-of-words (BoW) search when the vocabulary is large. A BoW-based appearance SLAM needs to tackle this problem for an efficient real-time operation. We propose an effective method to speed up the vector-quantization process in BoW-based visual SLAM. We employ a graph-based nearest neighbor search (GNNS) algorithm to this aim, and experimentally show that it can outperform the state-of-the-art. The graph-based search structure used in GNNS can efficiently be integrated into the BoW model and the SLAM framework. The graph-based index, which is a k-NN graph, is built over the vocabulary words and can be extracted from the BoW's vocabulary construction procedure, by adding one iteration to the k-means clustering, which adds small extra cost. Moreover, exploiting the fact that images acquired for appearance-based SLAM are sequential, GNNS search can be initiated judiciously which helps increase the speedup of the quantization process considerably

Scalable Image Retrieval by Sparse Product Quantization

Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search technique for high-dimensional feature indexing and retrieval is the crux of large-scale image retrieval. A recent promising technique is Product Quantization, which attempts to index high-dimensional image features by decomposing the feature space into a Cartesian product of low dimensional subspaces and quantizing each of them separately. Despite the promising results reported, their quantization approach follows the typical hard assignment of traditional quantization methods, which may result in large quantization errors and thus inferior search performance. Unlike the existing approaches, in this paper, we propose a novel approach called Sparse Product Quantization (SPQ) to encoding the high-dimensional feature vectors into sparse representation. We optimize the sparse representations of the feature vectors by minimizing their quantization errors, making the resulting representation is essentially close to the original data in practice. Experiments show that the proposed SPQ technique is not only able to compress data, but also an effective encoding technique. We obtain state-of-the-art results for ANN search on four public image datasets and the promising results of content-based image retrieval further validate the efficacy of our proposed method.Comment: 12 page

A reliable order-statistics-based approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm

We propose a new algorithm for fast approximate nearest neighbor search based on the properties of ordered vectors. Data vectors are classified based on the index and sign of their largest components, thereby partitioning the space in a number of cones centered in the origin. The query is itself classified, and the search starts from the selected cone and proceeds to neighboring ones. Overall, the proposed algorithm corresponds to locality sensitive hashing in the space of directions, with hashing based on the order of components. Thanks to the statistical features emerging through ordering, it deals very well with the challenging case of unstructured data, and is a valuable building block for more complex techniques dealing with structured data. Experiments on both simulated and real-world data prove the proposed algorithm to provide a state-of-the-art performance