Scaling object recognition: Benchmark of current state of the art techniques

Scaling from hundreds to millions of objects is the next challenge in visual recognition. We investigate and benchmark the scalability properties (memory requirements, runtime, recognition performance) of the state-of-the-art object recognition techniques: the forest of k-d trees, the locality sensitive hashing (LSH) method, and the approximate clustering procedure with the tf-idf inverted index. The characterization of the images was performed with SIFT features. We conduct experiments on two new datasets of more than 100,000 images each, and quantify the performance using artificial and natural deformations. We analyze the results and point out the pitfalls of each of the compared methodologies suggesting potential new research avenues for the field.