Improving VLAD: Hierarchical coding and a refined local coordinate system

The enormous growth of image databases calls for new techniques for fast and effective image search that scales with millions of images. Most importantly, the setting requires a compact but also descriptive image signature. Recently, the vector of aggregated local descriptors (VLAD) [1] has received much attention in large-scale image retrieval. In this paper we present two modifications for VLAD which improve the retrieval performance of the signature.