The framework based on the Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) feature representation and SVM classification is popularly used for generic content-based concept detection or visual categorization. However, visual vocabulary (VV) size, one important factor in this framework, is always chosen differently and arbitrarily in previous work. In this paper, we focus on investigating the optimal VV sizes depending on other components of this framework which also govern the performance. This is useful as a default VV size for reducing the computation cost. By unsupervised clustering, a series of VVs covering a wide range of sizes are evaluated under two popular local features, three assignment modes, and four kernels on two different-scale benchmarking datasets respectively. These factors are also evaluated. Experimental results show that best VV sizes vary as these factors change. However, the concept detection performance usually improves as the VV size increases initially, and then gains less, or even deteriorates if larger VVs are used since overfitting occurs. Overall, VVs with sizes ranging from 1024 to 4096 achieve best performance with higher probability when compared with other-size VVs. With regard to the other factors, experimental results show that the OpponentSIFT descriptor outperforms the SURF feature, and soft assignment mode yields better performance than binary and hard assignment. In addition, generalized RBF kernels such as X2 and Laplace RBF kernels are more appropriate for semantic concept detection with SVM classification. © 2013 IEEE.