Evaluation of second-order visual features for land-use classification

This paper investigates the use of recent visual features based on second-order statistics, as well as new processing techniques to improve the quality of features. More specifically, we present and evaluate Fisher Vectors (FV), Vectors of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD), and Vectors of Locally Aggregated Tensors (VLAT). These techniques are combined with several normalization techniques, such as power law normalization and orthogonalisation/whitening of descriptor spaces. Results on the UC Merced land use dataset shows the relevance of these new methods for land-use classification, as well as a significant improvement over Bag-of-Words.