On a Quest for Image Descriptors Based on Unsupervised Segmentation Maps

This paper investigates segmentation-based image descriptors for object category recognition. In contrast to commonly used interest points the proposed descriptors are extracted from pairs of adjacent regions given by a segmentation method. In this way we exploit semi-local structural information from the image. We propose to use the segments as spatial bins for descriptors of various image statistics based on gradient, colour and region shape. Proposed descriptors are validated on standard recognition benchmarks. Results show they outperform state-of-the-art reference descriptors with 5.6x less data and achieve comparable results to them with 8.6x less data. The proposed descriptors are complementary to SIFT and achieve state-of-the-art results when combined together within a kernel based classifier.