Representing local binary descriptors with BossaNova for visual recognition

Binary descriptors have recently become very popular in visual recognition tasks. This popularity is largely due to their low complexity and for presenting similar performances when compared to non binary descriptors, like SIFT. In literature, many researchers have applied binary descriptors in conjunction with mid-level representations (e.g., Bag-of-Words). However, despite these works have demonstrated promising results, their main problems are due to use of a simple mid-level representation and the use of binary descriptors in which rotation and scale invariance are missing. In order to address those problems, we propose to evaluate state-of-the-art binary descriptors, namely BRIEF, ORB, BRISK and FREAK, in a recent mid-level representation, namely BossaNova, which enriches the Bag-of-Words model, while preserving the binary descriptor information. Our experiments carried out in the challenging PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset revealed outstanding performances. Also, our approach shows good results in the challenging real-world application of pornography detection.