10. The apparatus of claim 6 , wherein the generative probabilistic model is a Gaussian mixture model.
6. An apparatus for compressing visual descriptors from at least one image by exploiting redundancy of natural image descriptors, comprising: a receiver of visual descriptors extracted from at least one image, said visual descriptors describing key points in images; a processor, configured to determine model parameters of a generative probabilistic model from the extracted visual descriptors in a maximum likelihood sense; a quantizer of said model parameters; an encoder of said quantized model parameters; a quantizer of said extracted visual descriptors; and an encoder for encoding said quantized extracted visual descriptors using said model parameters by applying a model based arithmetic encoding to exploit redundancy of the visual descriptors within the at least one image for compression of the visual descriptors.