A fast algorithm for creating a compact and discriminative visual codebook

Abstract

In patch-based object recognition, using a compact visual codebook can boost computational efficiency and reduce memory cost. Nevertheless, compared with a large-sized codebook, it also risks the loss of discriminative power. Moreover, creating a compact visual codebook can be very time-consuming, especially when the number of initial visual words is large. In this paper, to minimize its loss of discriminative power, we propose an approach to build a compact visual codebook by maximally preserving the separability of the object classes. Furthermore, a fast algorithm is designed to accomplish this task effortlessly, which can hierarchically merge 10,000 visual words down to 2 in ninety seconds. Experimental study shows that the compact visual codebook created in this way can achieve excellent classification performance even after a considerable reduction in size. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.