On the burstiness of visual elements

Burstiness, a phenomenon initially observed in text retrieval, is the property that a given visual element appears more times in an image than a statistically independent model would predict. In the context of image search, burstiness corrupts the visual similarity measure, i.e., the scores used to rank the images. In this paper, we propose a strategy to handle visual bursts for bag-of-features based image search systems. Experimental results on three reference datasets show that our method significantly and consistently outperforms the state of the art.

@InProceedings{JDS09a,
  author       = "Herv\'e J\'egou and Matthijs Douze and Cordelia Schmid",
  title        = "On the burstiness of visual elements",
  booktitle    = "Conference on Computer Vision \& Pattern Recognition",
  month        = "jun",
  year         = "2009",
  url          = "http://lear.inrialpes.fr/pubs/2009/JDS09a"
}