Binary Co-occurrences of Weak Descriptors

This paper demonstrates that a reliable and efficient object recognition system based only on binary joint occurrences of quantized descriptors can be built. Specifically, we show that a high recognition performance can be obtained even with very weak (non discriminative) descriptors. The binary joint occurrence representation despite being high dimensional is very sparse and therefore efficient. In order to obtain reliable joint occurrences we present a fast hierarchical quantization algorithm. We illustrate our results using different descriptors (PCA-SIFT, Spin images, SIFT) on a challenging, specific object recognition task and consider the scaling behavior of the method.