Rate-adaptive Compact Fisher Codes for Mobile Visual Search

Abstract

Extraction and transmission of compact descriptors are of great importance for next-generation mobile visual search applications. Existing visual descriptor techniques mainly compress visual features into compact codes of fixed bit rate, which is not adaptive to the bandwidth fluctuation in wireless environment. In this letter, we propose a Rate-adaptive Compact Fisher Codes (RCFC) to produce a bit rate scalable image signature. In particular, RCFC supports fast matching of descriptors based on Hamming distance; meanwhile, low memory footprint is offered. Extensive evaluation over benchmark databases shows that RCFC significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art and provides a promising descriptor scalability in terms of bit rates versus desired search performance.