Pooling in image representation: The visual codeword point of view

► We propose BossaNova, a novel pooling strategy that enriches the Bag-of-Words model. ► BossaNova introduces a non-parametric representation compact and simple to compute. ► BossaNova complements well the cutting-edge Fisher Vectors representation. ► BossaNova compares favorably with the state-of-the-art in the MIRFLICKR, ImageCLEF 2011, PASCAL VOC 2007 and 15-Scenes. In this work, we propose BossaNova, a novel representation for content-based concept detection in images and videos, which enriches the Bag-of-Words model. Relying on the quantization of highly discriminant local descriptors by a codebook, and the aggregation of those quantized descriptors into a single pooled feature vector, the Bag-of-Words model has emerged as the most promising approach for concept detection on visual documents. BossaNova enhances that representation by keeping a histogram of distances between the descriptors found in the image and those in the codebook, preserving thus important information about the distribution of the local descriptors around each codeword. Contrarily to other approaches found in the literature, the non-parametric histogram representation is compact and simple to compute. BossaNova compares well with the state-of-the-art in several standard datasets: MIRFLICKR, ImageCLEF 2011, PASCAL VOC 2007 and 15-Scenes, even without using complex combinations of different local descriptors. It also complements well the cutting-edge Fisher Vector descriptors, showing even better results when employed in combination with them. BossaNova also shows good results in the challenging real-world application of pornography detection.