A typical image retrieval pipeline starts with the comparison of global descriptors from a large database to find a short list of candidate matches. A good image descriptor is key to the retrieval pipeline and should reconcile two contradictory requirements: providing recall rates as high as possible and being as compact as possible for fast matching. Following the recent successes of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) for large scale image classification, descriptors extracted from DCNNs are increasingly used in place of the traditional hand crafted descriptors such as Fisher Vectors (FV) with better retrieval performances. Nevertheless, the dimensionality of a typical DCNN descriptor --extracted either from the visual feature pyramid or the fully-connected layers-- remains quite high at several thousands of scalar values. In this paper, we propose Unsupervised Triplet Hashing (UTH), a fully unsupervised method to compute extremely compact binary hashes --in the 32-256 bits range-- from high-dimensional global descriptors. UTH consists of two successive deep learning steps. First, Stacked Restricted Boltzmann Machines (SRBM), a type of unsupervised deep neural nets, are used to learn binary embedding functions able to bring the descriptor size down to the desired bitrate. SRBMs are typically able to ensure a very high compression rate at the expense of loosing some desirable metric properties of the original DCNN descriptor space. Then, triplet networks, a rank learning scheme based on weight sharing nets is used to fine-tune the binary embedding functions to retain as much as possible of the useful metric properties of the original space. A thorough empirical evaluation conducted on multiple publicly available dataset using DCNN descriptors shows that our method is able to significantly outperform state-of-the-art unsupervised schemes in the target bit range.
Motivated by the remarkable success of deep learning for large-scale image classification @cite_11 @cite_18 , recent work show that the use of representations extracted from DCNN is quickly gaining ground over hand-crafted descriptors such as Fisher Vectors as favoured state-of-the-art global image descriptors for image instance retrieval @cite_26 @cite_8 . While neural networks have been around for several decades, their resurgence can be attributed to two key factors: availability of large training data, and large amounts of computing power, which makes training large and deep networks possible. E.g., the neural networks in @cite_11 @cite_18 have 7 and 19 layers respectively, and take weeks to train with millions of images on GPU.
@cite_8 @cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_11
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Despite the great success of convolutional neural networks (CNN) for the image classification task on datasets like Cifar and ImageNet, CNN's representation power is still somewhat limited in dealing with object images that have large variation in size and clutter, where Fisher Vector (FV) has shown to be an effective encoding strategy. FV encodes an image by aggregating local descriptors with a universal generative Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). FV however has limited learning capability and its parameters are mostly fixed after constructing the codebook. To combine together the best of the two worlds, we propose in this paper a neural network structure with FV layer being part of an end-to-end trainable system that is differentiable; we name our network FisherNet that is learnable using backpropagation. Our proposed FisherNet combines convolutional neural network training and Fisher Vector encoding in a single end-to-end structure. We observe a clear advantage of FisherNet over plain CNN and standard FV in terms of both classification accuracy and computational efficiency on the challenging PASCAL VOC object classification task. With deep learning becoming the dominant approach in computer vision, the use of representations extracted from Convolutional Neural Nets (CNNs) is quickly gaining ground on Fisher Vectors (FVs) as favoured state-of-the-art global image descriptors for image instance retrieval. While the good performance of CNNs for image classification are unambiguously recognised, which of the two has the upper hand in the image retrieval context is not entirely clear yet. In this work, we propose a comprehensive study that systematically evaluates FVs and CNNs for image retrieval. The first part compares the performances of FVs and CNNs on multiple publicly available data sets. We investigate a number of details specific to each method. For FVs, we compare sparse descriptors based on interest point detectors with dense single-scale and multi-scale variants. For CNNs, we focus on understanding the impact of depth, architecture and training data on retrieval results. Our study shows that no descriptor is systematically better than the other and that performance gains can usually be obtained by using both types together. The second part of the study focuses on the impact of geometrical transformations such as rotations and scale changes. FVs based on interest point detectors are intrinsically resilient to such transformations while CNNs do not have a built-in mechanism to ensure such invariance. We show that performance of CNNs can quickly degrade in presence of rotations while they are far less affected by changes in scale. We then propose a number of ways to incorporate the required invariances in the CNN pipeline. Overall, our work is intended as a reference guide offering practically useful and simply implementable guidelines to anyone looking for state-of-the-art global descriptors best suited to their specific image instance retrieval problem. Automatically detecting illustrations is needed for the target system.Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have been successful in computer vision tasks.DCNN with fine-tuning outperformed the other models including handcrafted features. Systems for aggregating illustrations require a function for automatically distinguishing illustrations from photographs as they crawl the network to collect images. A previous attempt to implement this functionality by designing basic features that were deemed useful for classification achieved an accuracy of only about 58 . On the other hand, deep neural networks had been successful in computer vision tasks, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) had performed good at extracting such useful image features automatically. We evaluated alternative methods to implement this classification functionality with focus on deep neural networks. As the result of experiments, the method that fine-tuned deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) acquired 96.8 accuracy, outperforming the other models including the custom CNN models that were trained from scratch. We conclude that DCNN with fine-tuning is the best method for implementing a function for automatically distinguishing illustrations from photographs. Recent results indicate that the generic descriptors extracted from the convolutional neural networks are very powerful. This paper adds to the mounting evidence that this is indeed the case. We report on a series of experiments conducted for different recognition tasks using the publicly available code and model of the network which was trained to perform object classification on ILSVRC13. We use features extracted from the network as a generic image representation to tackle the diverse range of recognition tasks of object image classification, scene recognition, fine grained recognition, attribute detection and image retrieval applied to a diverse set of datasets. We selected these tasks and datasets as they gradually move further away from the original task and data the network was trained to solve. Astonishingly, we report consistent superior results compared to the highly tuned state-of-the-art systems in all the visual classification tasks on various datasets. For instance retrieval it consistently outperforms low memory footprint methods except for sculptures dataset. The results are achieved using a linear SVM classifier (or @math distance in case of retrieval) applied to a feature representation of size 4096 extracted from a layer in the net. The representations are further modified using simple augmentation techniques e.g. jittering. The results strongly suggest that features obtained from deep learning with convolutional nets should be the primary candidate in most visual recognition tasks.