Compact and adaptive spatial pyramids for scene recognition

► A major drawback of Spatial Pyramid (SP) is the high dimensionality. We present a novel framework to obtain compact SP. ► We present compression strategies based on an extension to the agglomerative information bottleneck algorithm. ► We present a novel spatial texture descriptor (PC-TPLBP) for the problem of scene recognition. ► We show the importance of combining PC-TPLBP (regional) with pixel-based features (local) for improving performance.