Hamming embedding with fragile bits for image search

Recently, several binary descriptors are proposed, which represent interest points in image using binary codes. In these binary feature schemes, two descriptors are considered as a match, if the Hamming distance between them is below a threshold. Applying Hamming distance to measure the similarity between binary descriptors can extremely promote the computational efficiency. However, our experimental results presents that there exists a large number of bits in the binary feature vector cannot maintain the robustness while image conditions change. Rather than ignore the impacts of those unstable bits, we take into account the difference of robustness among the feature bits and propose a novel similarity measurement, which called the Fragile Bit Ratio (FBR). FBR is used in binary feature matching to measure how two features differ. High FBRs are associated with genuine matches between two binary features and low FBRs are associated with impostor ones. Based on this metric, we propose a new binary feature matching scheme to fuse the Hamming distance and Fragile Bit Ratio. In our approach, we match the descriptors using the Hamming distance threshold roughly, and then filtered by the Fragile Bits Ratio to refine the candidate set. In experiments, using Fragile Bits Radio can effectively remove the false matches and highly improve the accuracy of image search. Furthermore, our method can easily be integrated into the other well-established binary features schemes.