Visual codebook construction for class-specific recognition

Creating a visual codebook is an important problem in object recognition. Using a compact visual codebook can boost computational efficiency and reduce memory cost. A simple and effective method is proposed for visual feature codebook construction. On the basis of a feedforward hierarchical model, a robust local descriptor is proposed and an a priori statistical scheme is applied to the class-specific feature-learning stage. The experiments show that the proposed approach achieves reliable performance with shorter codebook length, and incremental learning can be easily enabled. (C) 2009 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. [DOI: 10.1117/1.3160333]