Randomized Visual Phrases for Object Search

Accurate matching of local features plays an essential role in visual object search. Instead of matching individual features separately, using the spatial context, e.g.,bundling a group of co-located features into a visual phrase, has shown to enable more discriminative matching. Despite previous work, it remains a challenging problem to extract appropriate spatial context for matching. We propose a randomized approach to deriving visual phrase, in the form of spatial random partition. By averaging the matching scores over multiple randomized visual phrases, our approach offers three benefits: 1) the aggregation of the matching scores over a collection of visual phrases of varying sizes and shapes provides robust local matching; 2)object localization is achieved by simple thresholding on the voting map, which is more efficient than subimage search; 3) our algorithm lends itself to easy parallelization and also allows a flexible trade-off between accuracy and speed by adjusting the number of partition times. Both theoretical studies and experimental comparisons with the state-of-the-art methods validate the advantages of our approach.