Bamboo: A fast descriptor based on AsymMetric pairwise BOOsting

Abstract

A robust hash, or content-based fingerprint, is a succinct representation of the perceptually most relevant parts of a multimedia object. A key requirement of fingerprinting is that elements with perceptually similar content should map to the same fingerprint, even if their bitlevel representations are different. In this work we propose BAMBOO (Binary descriptor based on AsymMetric pairwise BOOsting), a binary local descriptor that exploits a combination of content-based fingerprinting techniques and computationally efficient filters (box filters, Haar-like features, etc.) applied to image patches. In particular, we define a possibly large set of filters and iteratively select the most discriminative ones resorting to an asymmetric pair-wise boosting technique. The output values of the filtering process are quantized to one bit, leading to a very compact binary descriptor. Results show that such descriptor leads to compelling results, significantly outperforming binary descriptors having comparable complexity (e.g., BRISK), and approaching the discriminative power of state-of-the-art descriptors which are significantly more complex (e.g., SIFT and BinBoost).