Discovering informative features in large-scale landmark image collection

Abstract

One of the key problems in image retrieval systems is the presence of irrelevant and noisy image content. Such content can cause significant confusion for the system. Therefore, there is a need to represent images with only informative features in order to improve the retrieval performance of the system or any subsequent process. In this article, we propose a method to identify the informative features in a large-scale image collection. We apply the frequent itemset mining (FIM) approach to extract visual features patterns from a list of images of the same object. Then, we generate feature pairs to measure the significance of each feature depending on the co-occurrence with its neighbouring features. In addition, we apply this feature selection technique to localise the landmark in the image. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of average precision (AP) on two benchmark data sets and found that it gives a comparable retrieval performance over the bag of visual words baseline system and the previous methods.