Techniques are provided that include obtaining a vocabulary including a set of content indices that reference corresponding cells in a descriptor space based on an input set of descriptors. A plurality of local features of an image are identified based on the vocabulary, the local features being represented by a plurality of local descriptors. An associated visual word in the vocabulary is determined for each of the plurality of local descriptors. A plurality of global signatures for the image are generated based on the associated visual words, wherein some of the plurality of global signatures are generated using local descriptors corresponding to different cropped versions of the image, two or more of the different cropped versions of the image being centered at a same pixel location of the image, and an image recognition search is facilitated using the plurality of global signatures to search a document image dataset.