Analysis of Using Metric Access Methods for Visual Search of Objects in Video Databases

Abstract

This article presents an approach to object retrieval that searches for and localizes all the occurrences of an object in a video database, given a query image of the object. Our proposal is based on text-retrieval methods in which video key frames are represented by a dense set of viewpoint invariant region descriptors that enable recognition to proceed successfully despite changes in camera viewpoint, lighting, and partial occlusions. Vector quantizing these region descriptors provides a visual analogy of a word - a visual word. Those words are grouped into a visual vocabulary which is used to index all key frames from the video database. Efficient retrieval is then achieved by employing methods from statistical text retrieval, including inverted file systems, and text-document frequency weightings. Though works in the literature have only adopted a simple sequential scan during search, we investigate the use of different metric access methods (MAM): M-tree, Slim-tree, and D-index, in order to accelerate the processing of similarity queries. In addition, a ranking strategy based on the spatial layout of the regions (spatial consistency) is fully described and evaluated. Experimental results have shown that the adoption of MAMs not only has improved the search performance but also has reduced the influence of the vocabulary size over test results, which may improve the scalability of our proposal. Finally, the application of spatial consistency has produced a very significant improvement of the results.