  Binary local features represent an effective alternative to real-valued
descriptors, leading to comparable results for many visual analysis tasks,
while being characterized by significantly lower computational complexity and
memory requirements. When dealing with large collections, a more compact
representation based on global features is often preferred, which can be
obtained from local features by means of, e.g., the Bag-of-Visual-Word (BoVW)
model. Several applications, including for example visual sensor networks and
mobile augmented reality, require visual features to be transmitted over a
bandwidth-limited network, thus calling for coding techniques that aim at
reducing the required bit budget, while attaining a target level of efficiency.
In this paper we investigate a coding scheme tailored to both local and global
binary features, which aims at exploiting both spatial and temporal redundancy
by means of intra- and inter-frame coding. In this respect, the proposed coding
scheme can be conveniently adopted to support the Analyze-Then-Compress (ATC)
paradigm. That is, visual features are extracted from the acquired content,
encoded at remote nodes, and finally transmitted to a central controller that
performs visual analysis. This is in contrast with the traditional approach, in
which visual content is acquired at a node, compressed and then sent to a
central unit for further processing, according to the Compress-Then-Analyze
(CTA) paradigm. In this paper we experimentally compare ATC and CTA by means of
rate-efficiency curves in the context of two different visual analysis tasks:
homography estimation and content-based retrieval. Our results show that the
novel ATC paradigm based on the proposed coding primitives can be competitive
with CTA, especially in bandwidth limited scenarios.
