Burstiness, a phenomenon initially observed in text re-
trieval, is the property that a given visual element appears
more times in an image than a statistically independent
model would predict. In the context of image search, bursti-
ness corrupts the visual similarity measure, i.e., the scores
used to rank the images. In this paper, we propose a strat-
egy to handle visual bursts for bag-of-features based im-
age search systems. Experimental results on three reference
datasets show that our method significantly and consistently
outperforms the state of the art.