Saliency Filtering of SIFT Detectors: Application to CBIR

Abstract

The recognition of object categories is one of the most challenging problems in computer vision field.It is still an open problem , especially in content based image retrieval (CBIR).When using analysis algorithm, a trade-off must be found between the quality of the results expected, and the amount of computer resources allocated to manage huge amount of generated data. In human, the mechanisms of evolution have generated the visual attention system which selects the most important information in order to reduce both cognitive load and scene understanding ambiguity. In computer science, most powerful algorithms use local approaches as bag-of-features or sparse local features. In this article, we propose to evaluate the integration of one of the most recent visual attention model in one of the most efficient CBIR method. First, we present these two algorithms and the database used to test results. Then, we present our approach which consists in pruning interest points in order to select a certain percentage of them (40% to 10% ). This filtering is guided by a saliency map provided by a visual attention system. Finally, we present our results which clearly demonstrate that interest points used in classical CBIR methods can be drastically pruned without seriously impacting results. We also demonstrate that we have to smartly filter learning and training data set to obtain such results.