Toward Compressed 3D Descriptors

Visual search for mobile devices relies on transmitting wirelessly a compact representation of the query image, generally in the form of feature descriptors, to a remote server. Descriptors are therefore compressed, so as to reduce bandwidth occupancy and network latency. Given the impressive pace of growth of 3D video technology, we foresee 3D visual search applications for the mobile and the robotic market to become a reality. Accordingly, our work proposes a study on compressed 3D descriptors, a fundamental building block for such prospective applications. Based on analysis of several compression approaches, we develop and assess different schemes to achieve a compact version of a state-of-the-art 3D descriptor. Through experiments on a vast dataset we demonstrate the ability to achieve compression rates as high as 98% with a negligible loss in 3D visual search performance.