Abstract
State-of-the-art visual search systems allow to retrieve efficiently small rigid objects in very large datasets. They are usually based on the query-by-window paradigm: a user selects any image region containing an object of interest and the system returns a ranked list of images that are likely to contain other instances of the query object. User's perception of these tools is however affected by the fact that many submitted queries actually return nothing or only junk results (complex non-rigid objects, higher-level visual concepts, etc.). In this paper, we address the problem of suggesting only the object's queries that actually contain relevant matches in the dataset. This requires to first discover accurate object's clusters in the dataset (as an offline process); and then to select the most relevant objects according to user's intent (as an on-line process). We therefore introduce a new object's instances clustering framework based on a major contribution: a bipartite shared-neighbours clustering algorithm that is used to gather object's seeds discovered by matching adaptive and weighted sampling. Shared nearest neighbours methods were not studied beforehand in the case of bipartite graphs and never used in the context of object discovery. Experiments show that this new method outperforms state-of-the-art object mining and retrieval results on the Oxford Building dataset. We finally describe two object-based visual query suggestion scenarios using the proposed framework and show examples of suggested object queries.