Large-scale robust visual codebook construction

The web-scale image retrieval system demands a large-scale visual codebook, which is difficult to be generated by the commonly adopted K-means vector quantization due to the applicability issue. While approximate K-means is proposed to scale up the visual codebook construction it needs to employ a high-precision approximate nearest neighbor search in the assignment step and is difficult to converge, which limits its scalability. In this paper, we propose an improved approximate K-means, by leveraging the assignment information in the history, namely the previous iterations, to improve the assignment precision. By further randomizing the employed approximate nearest neighbor search in each iteration, the proposed algorithm can improve the assignment precision conceptually similarly as the randomized k-d trees, while nearly no additional cost is introduced. The algorithm can be proved to be convergent and we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves the quality of the generated visual codebook as well as the scalability experimentally and analytically.