Che-Chun Lee, Yin-Hsi Kuo, Winston H. Hsu, Shin'ichi Satoh, Sebastian Agethen
ACM Multimedia, Pages 1185-1188, November 2014
Publication year: 2014

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) technique is important for browsing the rapidly growing Web images. However, traditional CBIR methods usually fail when the query and database images are in different domains. Instead of focusing on a specific domain, we propose a method to solve the general cross-domain image retrieval problem. This method focuses on the structure of image content but not the detail at pixel level, so it is particularly useful for matching the images across different visual domains e.g., paintings, hand-drawn sketches or photographs. To provide an efficient and effective solution, we analyze the bag-of-words (BoW) matching procedure to find out what causing it to fail in the cross-domain setting. We observe that it is necessary to apply different matching constraints for cross-domain image retrieval; therefore, we propose a multi-level matching process which dynamically selects the most suitable matching constraint for feature matching and adopt a fast spatial verification to describe the structure similarity. Finally, our method is much faster than the state-of-the-art solution and achieves better performance in the experiments.