My tutorial proposal “Advanced Techniques in CBIR: Local Descriptors, Visual Dictionaries and Bags of Features” has been accepted on the Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing (SIBGRAPI 2009), which will be held at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil between October 11th and 14th, 2009. The tutorial itself will probably happen on October 11th.

Here’s the abstract:

“Local descriptors have been extensively used in CBIR systems, where their robustness to intense geometric and photometric transformations allows the identification of a target object/image with great reliability. However, due to their excessive discriminating power, their application to the retrieval of complex categories is challenging. The introduction of the technique of ‘visual dictionaries’ (also known as ‘dictionary of visual terms’) is an important step towards the conciliation between the robustness of local descriptors and the flexibility of generalization needed by complex queries. As a bonus, we become able to employ advanced retrieval techniques which were so far available only for textual data.

The importance of local descriptors in the current practice of CBIR can hardly be overestimated, and the introduction of the ‘visual dictionary’ technique has allowed to employ them on complex category search, a context where they were previously considered too discriminating to work effectively. In this tutorial we will address all the conceptual components of a powerful framework — the CBIR system architecture itself, the local descriptors and the techniques which allow their advanced application. At the end, the audience will have a good idea of the current state of art, the most promising research trends and the challenges still faced by the technology.”

The tutorial will take 3 hours and will be given either in English or Portuguese, according to the composition of the classroom.

EDIT 11/11/2009: The tutorial survey is available on my publications page.