A Novel Discriminating and Relative Global Spatial Image Representation with Applications in CBIR

The requirement for effective image search, which motivates the use of Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) and the search of similar multimedia contents on the basis of user query, remains an open research problem for computer vision applications. The application domains for Bag of Visual Words (BoVW) based image representations are object recognition, image classification and content-based image analysis. Interest point detectors are quantized in the feature space and the final histogram or image signature do not retain any detail about co-occurrences of features in the 2D image space. This spatial information is crucial, as it adversely affects the performance of an image classification-based model. The most notable contribution in this context is Spatial Pyramid Matching (SPM), which captures the absolute spatial distribution of visual words. However, SPM is sensitive to image transformations such as rotation, flipping and translation. When images are not well-aligned, SPM may lose its discriminative power. This paper introduces a novel approach to encoding the relative spatial information for histogram-based representation of the BoVW model. This is established by computing the global geometric relationship between pairs of identical visual words with respect to the centroid of an image. The proposed research is evaluated by using five different datasets. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the robustness of the proposed image representation as compared to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision and recall values.