This paper addresses the problem of very large-scale image retrieval, focusing on improving its accuracy and robustness. We target enhanced robustness of search to factors, such as variations in illumination, object appearance and scale, partial occlusions, and cluttered backgrounds—particularly important when a search is performed across very large datasets with significant variability. We propose a novel CNN-based global descriptor, called REMAP, which learns and aggregates a hierarchy of deep features from multiple CNN layers, and is trained end-to-end with a triplet loss. REMAP explicitly learns discriminative features which are mutually supportive and complementary at various semantic levels of visual abstraction. These dense local features are max-pooled spatially at each layer, within multi-scale overlapping regions, before aggregation into a single image-level descriptor. To identify the semantically useful regions and layers for retrieval, we propose to measure the information gain of each region and layer using KL-divergence. Our system effectively learns during training how useful various regions and layers are and weights them accordingly. We show that such relative entropy-guided aggregation outperforms classical CNN-based aggregation controlled by SGD. The entire framework is trained in an end-to-end fashion, outperforming the latest state-of-the-art results. On image retrieval datasets Holidays, Oxford, and MPEG, the REMAP descriptor achieves mAP of 95.5 , 91.5 , and 80.1 , respectively, outperforming any results published to date. REMAP also formed the core of the winning submission to the Google Landmark Retrieval Challenge on Kaggle.
Early approaches typically involve extracting multiple local descriptors (usually hand-crafted), and combining them into a fixed length image-level representation for fast matching. Local descriptors may be scale-invariant and centered on image feature points, such as for SIFT @cite_6 , or extracted on regular, dense grids, possibly at multiple scales independently of the image content @cite_20 . An impressive number of local descriptors have been developed over years, each claiming superiority, making it difficult to select the best one for the job - an attempt at comparative study can be found in @cite_18 . It should be noted that descriptor dimension (for hand-crafted features) is typically between 32 and 192, which is an order or two less than the number of deep features available for each image region.
@cite_18 @cite_20 @cite_6
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Local descriptors are mostly extracted over the raw intensity values of the image and requires the analysis of patterns in local pixel neighborhoods. The raw images don't provide much local relationship information required for the local descriptors. To resolve this problem, a new method of local image feature description is proposed in this paper based on the patterns extracted from the multiple filtered images. The whole process is structured as follows: First, the images are filtered with the bag of filters (BoF) and then local binary pattern (LBP) is computed over each filtered image and finally concatenated to find out the single BoF-LBP descriptor. The local information enriches in the filtered images improves the discriminative ability of the final descriptor. Content based image retrieval (CBIR) experiments are performed to observe the effectiveness of the proposed approach and compared with the recent state-of-the-art methods. The experiments are conducted over four benchmark databases having natural and texture images such as Corel-1k, Corel-10k, MIT-VisTex and STex-512S. The experimental results confirm that the introduced approach is able to improve the retrieval performance of the CBIR system. Visual search and image retrieval underpin numerous applications, however the task is still challenging predominantly due to the variability of object appearance and ever increasing size of the databases, often exceeding billions of images. Prior art methods rely on aggregation of local scale-invariant descriptors, such as SIFT, via mechanisms including Bag of Visual Words (BoW), Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) and Fisher Vectors (FV). However, their performance is still short of what is required. This paper presents a novel method for deriving a compact and distinctive representation of image content called Robust Visual Descriptor with Whitening (RVD-W). It significantly advances the state of the art and delivers world-class performance. In our approach local descriptors are rank-assigned to multiple clusters. Residual vectors are then computed in each cluster, normalized using a direction-preserving normalization function and aggregated based on the neighborhood rank. Importantly, the residual vectors are de-correlated and whitened in each cluster before aggregation, leading to a balanced energy distribution in each dimension and significantly improved performance. We also propose a new post-PCA normalization approach which improves separability between the matching and non-matching global descriptors. This new normalization benefits not only our RVD-W descriptor but also improves existing approaches based on FV and VLAD aggregation. Furthermore, we show that the aggregation framework developed using hand-crafted SIFT features also performs exceptionally well with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based features. The RVD-W pipeline outperforms state-of-the-art global descriptors on both the Holidays and Oxford datasets. On the large scale datasets, Holidays1M and Oxford1M, SIFT-based RVD-W representation obtains a mAP of 45.1 and 35.1 percent, while CNN-based RVD-W achieve a mAP of 63.5 and 44.8 percent, all yielding superior performance to the state-of-the-art. The objective of this paper is large scale object instance retrieval, given a query image. A starting point of such systems is feature detection and description, for example using SIFT. The focus of this paper, however, is towards very large scale retrieval where, due to storage requirements, very compact image descriptors are required and no information about the original SIFT descriptors can be accessed directly at run time. We start from VLAD, the state-of-the art compact descriptor introduced by for this purpose, and make three novel contributions: first, we show that a simple change to the normalization method significantly improves retrieval performance, second, we show that vocabulary adaptation can substantially alleviate problems caused when images are added to the dataset after initial vocabulary learning. These two methods set a new state-of-the-art over all benchmarks investigated here for both mid-dimensional (20k-D to 30k-D) and small (128-D) descriptors. Our third contribution is a multiple spatial VLAD representation, MultiVLAD, that allows the retrieval and localization of objects that only extend over a small part of an image (again without requiring use of the original image SIFT descriptors). We introduce a novel local image descriptor designed for dense wide-baseline matching purposes. We feed our descriptors to a graph-cuts based dense depth map estimation algorithm and this yields better wide-baseline performance than the commonly used correlation windows for which the size is hard to tune. As a result, unlike competing techniques that require many high-resolution images to produce good reconstructions, our descriptor can compute them from pairs of low-quality images such as the ones captured by video streams. Our descriptor is inspired from earlier ones such as SIFT and GLOH but can be computed much faster for our purposes. Unlike SURF which can also be computed efficiently at every pixel, it does not introduce artifacts that degrade the matching performance. Our approach was tested with ground truth laser scanned depth maps as well as on a wide variety of image pairs of different resolutions and we show that good reconstructions are achieved even with only two low quality images.