Towards automated large scale discovery of image families

Gathering large collections of images is quite easy nowadays with the advent of image sharing Web sites, such as flickr.com. However, such collections inevitably contain duplicates and highly similar images, what we refer to as image families. Automatic discovery and cataloguing of such similar images in large collections is important for many applications, e.g. image search, image collection visualization, and research purposes among others. In this work, we investigate this problem by thoroughly comparing two broad approaches for measuring image similarity: global vs. local features. We assess their performance as the image collection scales up to over 11,000 images with over 6,300 families. We present our results on three datasets with different statistics, including two new challenging datasets. Moreover, we present a new algorithm to automatically determine the number of families in the collection with promising results.