Spatially-aware indexing for image object retrieval

The success of image object retrieval systems relies on the visual bag-of-words paradigm, which allows image retrieval systems to adopt a retrieval strategy analogous to text retrieval. In this paper we propose two spatially-aware retrieval strategies for image object retrieval that replaces the vector space model. The advantage of the proposed spatially-aware indexing and retrieval strategies are threefold: (1) It allows for the deployment of small visual vocabularies, (2) the number of images evaluated at retrieval time is significantly reduced, and (3) it eliminates the need for a post-retrieval phase, which is normally used to test the spatial composition of the visual words in the retrieved images.