Mobile image search using multi-query images

Recent advances in mobile device technology have turned the mobile phones into powerfull devices with high resolution cameras and fast processing capabilities. Having more user interaction potential compared to regular PCs, mobile devices with cameras can enable richer content-based object image queries: the user can capture multiple images of the query object from different viewing angles and at different scales, thereby providing much more information about the object to improve the retrieval accuracy. The goal of this paper is to improve the mobile image retrieval performance using multiple query images. To this end, we use the well-known bag-of-visual-words approach to represent the images, and employ early and late fusion strategies to utilize the information in multiple query images. With extensive experiments on an object image dataset with a single object per image, we show that multi-image queries result in higher average precision performance than single image queries.