Image Retrieval with Fisher Vectors of Binary Features

Recently, the Fisher vector representation of local features has attracted much attention because of its effectiveness in both image classification and image retrieval. Another trend in the area of image retrieval is the use of binary feature such as ORB, FREAK, and BRISK. Considering the significant performance improvement in terms of accuracy in both image classification and retrieval by the Fisher vector of continuous feature descriptors, if the Fisher vector were also to be applied to binary features, we would receive the same benefits in binary feature based image retrieval and classification. In this paper, we derive the closed-form approximation of the Fisher vector of binary features which are modeled by the Bernoulli mixture model. In experiments, it is shown that the Fisher vector representation improves the accuracy of image retrieval by 25% compared with a bag of binary words approach.