In this paper we provide an overview of an image representation approach based on the description of layout and appearance properties of groups of features. In each image a graph of quantized features of interest is constructed. The features that are assigned to the same codebook bin are then grouped to produce a collapsed graph; the image content is represented by the matrix of commute times of this collapsed graph. This novel image descriptor can be used to label satellite image databases; we demonstrate the relevance and the efficiency of our approach by addressing classification problems on a dataset of 0.6 m resolution Quick bird images.