Selecting visually overlapping image pairs without any prior information is an essential task of large-scale structure from motion (SfM) pipelines. To address this problem, many state-of-the-art image retrieval systems adopt the idea of bag of visual words (BoVW) for computing image-pair similarity. In this paper, we present a method for improving the image pair selection using BoVW. Our method combines a conventional vector-based approach and a set-based approach. For the set similarity, we introduce a modified version of the Simpson (m-Simpson) coefficient. We show the advantage of this measure over three typical set similarity measures and demonstrate that the combination of vector similarity and the m-Simpson coefficient effectively reduces false positives and increases accuracy. To discuss the choice of vocabulary construction, we prepared both a sampled vocabulary on an evaluation dataset and a basic pre-trained vocabulary on a training dataset. In addition, we tested our method on vocabularies of different sizes. Our experimental results show that the proposed method dramatically improves precision scores especially on the sampled vocabulary and performs better than the state-of-the-art methods that use pre-trained vocabularies. We further introduce a method to determine the k value of top-k relevant searches for each image and show that it obtains higher precision at the same recall.

To expand the use of systems using a camera on portable devices such as tablets and smartphones, we have developed and propose a memory saving feature descriptor, the use of which is one of the essential techniques in computer vision. The proposed descriptor compares pixel values of pre-fixed positions in the small patch around the feature point and stores binary values. Like the conventional descriptors, it extracts the patch on the basis of the scale and orientation of the feature point. For memories of the same size, it achieves higher accuracy than ORB and BRISK in all cases and AKAZE for the images with textured regions.