Boosting object retrieval with group queries

Abstract

Given a query image of an object, object retrieval aims to return all images from a corpus that depict the same object. Inevitably, the accuracy of the result depends strongly on the quality of the query image. Several measures have been taken to improve retrieval result quality, including the addition of a bounding box to the query, the mining of highly ranked results for more views of the object, and spatial consistency re-ranking. In this letter, we propose a discriminative criterion for improving result quality. This criterion lends itself to the addition of extra query data, and we show that multiple query images can be combined to produce enhanced results. Experiments compare the performance of the method to state-of-the-art in object retrieval, and show how performance is lifted by the inclusion of further query images.