Patent ID: 8892542

Claim:
A method to search for a query image, comprising detecting local invariant features and local descriptors; retrieving best matching images by incorporating one or more contexts in matching quantized local descriptors with a vocabulary tree; reordering retrieved images with results from the vocabulary tree quantization; measuring similarity of local descriptors through image specific descriptor weighting; and comprising v, where weight w i q is defined based on the node counts along the quantization path of x i , comprising determining w i q = ∑ v ∈ T ⁡ ( x i ) ⁢ ω ⁡ ( v ) ∑ v ∈ T ⁡ ( x i ) ⁢ ω ⁡ ( v ) × n q ⁡ ( v ) , where ω(v) is a weighting coefficient set to idƒ(v) empirically, where weight w i q depends on the descriptor only, and is shared for all nodes v along the path T(x i ) and where n q (v) represents a number of descriptors in image q that are quantized to v.