Scene-based image retrieval by transitive matching

We address scene-based image retrieval, the challenge of finding pictures taken at the same location as a given query image, whereas a key challenge lies in the fact that target images may show the same scene but different parts of it. To overcome this lack of direct correspondences with the query image, we study two strategies that exploit the structure of the targeted image collection: first, cluster matching, where pictures are grouped and retrieval is conducted on cluster level. Second, we propose a probabilistically motivated shortest path approach that determines retrieval scores based on the shortest path in a cost graph defined over the image collection. We evaluate both approaches on several datasets including indoor and outdoor locations, demonstrating that the accuracy of scene-based retrieval can be improved distinctly (by up to 40%), particularly by the shortest path approach.