Inertial sensors supported visual descriptors encoding and geometric verification for mobile visual location recognition applications

•We investigate the problem of city scale on device mobile visual search applications.•We propose an improved transform coding algorithm to compress city scale datasets.•A new algorithm is designed to perform Geometric Verification on a mobile device.

In this paper, two contributions are introduced to improve the accuracy of city scale on-device Mobile Visual Location Recognition (MVLR) systems. Firstly, to compress image descriptors, we design an improved Transform Coding (TC) algorithm for the implementation of a location aware encoding strategy. Compared with traditional encoding algorithms, our algorithm can provide reasonable searching accuracy with very low memory consumption, which makes the implementation of the location aware image descriptors encoding directly on a mobile device come true. Secondly, to perform Geometric Verification (GV) directly on a mobile device, we design a gravity aligned geometric encoding algorithm. The algorithm is not only memory and computation efficient, but also can improve the location recognition accuracy obviously. Experiments on city scale datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.