  In this paper, we present the Hierarchy-of-Visual-Words (HoVW), a novel
trademark image retrieval (TIR) method that decomposes images into simpler
geometric shapes and defines a descriptor for binary trademark image
representation by encoding the hierarchical arrangement of component shapes.
The proposed hierarchical organization of visual data stores each component
shape as a visual word. It is capable of representing the geometry of
individual elements and the topology of the trademark image, making the
descriptor robust against linear as well as to some level of nonlinear
transformation. Experiments show that HoVW outperforms previous TIR methods on
the MPEG-7 CE-1 and MPEG-7 CE-2 image databases.
