Handling Significant Scale Difference for Object Retrieval in a Supermarket

We propose an object retrieval application which can retrieve user specified objects from a big supermarket. Significant and unpredictable scale difference between the query and the database image is the major obstacle encountered. The widely used local invariant features show their deficiency in such an occasion. To improve the situation, we first design a new weighting scheme which can assess the repeatability of local features against scale variance. Also, another method which deals with scale difference through retrieving a query under multiple scales is also developed. Our methods have been tested on a real image database collected from a local supermarket and outperform the existing local invariant feature based image retrieval approaches. A new spatial check method is also briefly discussed.