  A novel representation of images for image retrieval is introduced in this
paper, by using a new type of feature with remarkable discriminative power.
Despite the multi-scale nature of objects, most existing models perform feature
extraction on a fixed scale, which will inevitably degrade the performance of
the whole system. Motivated by this, we introduce a hierarchical sparse coding
architecture for image retrieval to explore multi-scale cues. Sparse codes
extracted on lower layers are transmitted to higher layers recursively. With
this mechanism, cues from different scales are fused. Experiments on the
Holidays dataset show that the proposed method achieves an excellent retrieval
performance with a small code length.
