We propose a novel approach for instance-level image retrieval. It produces a global and compact fixed-length representation for each image by aggregating many region-wise descriptors. In contrast to previous works employing pre-trained deep networks as a black box to produce features, our method leverages a deep architecture trained for the specific task of image retrieval. Our contribution is twofold: (i) we leverage a ranking framework to learn convolution and projection weights that are used to build the region features; and (ii) we employ a region proposal network to learn which regions should be pooled to form the final global descriptor. We show that using clean training data is key to the success of our approach. To that aim, we use a large scale but noisy landmark dataset and develop an automatic cleaning approach. The proposed architecture produces a global image representation in a single forward pass. Our approach significantly outperforms previous approaches based on global descriptors on standard datasets. It even surpasses most prior works based on costly local descriptor indexing and spatial verification. Additional material is available at www.xrce.xerox.com Deep-Image-Retrieval.
Conventional image retrieval Early techniques for instance-level retrieval are based on bag-of-features representations with large vocabularies and inverted files @cite_60 @cite_55 . Numerous methods to better approximate the matching of the descriptors have been proposed, see @cite_38 @cite_1 . An advantage of these techniques is that spatial verification can be employed to re-rank a short-list of results @cite_55 @cite_28 , yielding a significant improvement despite a significant cost. Concurrently, methods that aggregate the local image patches have been considered. Encoding techniques, such as the Fisher Vector @cite_39 , or VLAD @cite_49 , combined with compression @cite_50 @cite_44 @cite_40 produce global descriptors that scale to larger databases at the cost of reduced accuracy. All these methods can be combined with other post-processing techniques such as query expansion @cite_25 @cite_0 @cite_22 .
@cite_38 @cite_22 @cite_60 @cite_28 @cite_55 @cite_1 @cite_39 @cite_44 @cite_0 @cite_40 @cite_49 @cite_50 @cite_25
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The objective of this work is object retrieval in large scale image datasets, where the object is specified by an image query and retrieval should be immediate at run time in the manner of Video Google [28]. We make the following three contributions: (i) a new method to compare SIFT descriptors (RootSIFT) which yields superior performance without increasing processing or storage requirements; (ii) a novel method for query expansion where a richer model for the query is learnt discriminatively in a form suited to immediate retrieval through efficient use of the inverted index; (iii) an improvement of the image augmentation method proposed by Turcot and Lowe [29], where only the augmenting features which are spatially consistent with the augmented image are kept. We evaluate these three methods over a number of standard benchmark datasets (Oxford Buildings 5k and 105k, and Paris 6k) and demonstrate substantial improvements in retrieval performance whilst maintaining immediate retrieval speeds. Combining these complementary methods achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on these datasets. A recognition scheme that scales efficiently to a large number of objects is presented. The efficiency and quality is exhibited in a live demonstration that recognizes CD-covers from a database of 40000 images of popular music CDs. The scheme builds upon popular techniques of indexing descriptors extracted from local regions, and is robust to background clutter and occlusion. The local region descriptors are hierarchically quantized in a vocabulary tree. The vocabulary tree allows a larger and more discriminatory vocabulary to be used efficiently, which we show experimentally leads to a dramatic improvement in retrieval quality. The most significant property of the scheme is that the tree directly defines the quantization. The quantization and the indexing are therefore fully integrated, essentially being one and the same. The recognition quality is evaluated through retrieval on a database with ground truth, showing the power of the vocabulary tree approach, going as high as 1 million images. State of the art methods for image and object retrieval exploit both appearance (via visual words) and local geometry (spatial extent, relative pose). In large scale problems, memory becomes a limiting factor - local geometry is stored for each feature detected in each image and requires storage larger than the inverted file and term frequency and inverted document frequency weights together. We propose a novel method for learning discretized local geometry representation based on minimization of average reprojection error in the space of ellipses. The representation requires only 24 bits per feature without drop in performance. Additionally, we show that if the gravity vector assumption is used consistently from the feature description to spatial verification, it improves retrieval performance and decreases the memory footprint. The proposed method outperforms state of the art retrieval algorithms in a standard image retrieval benchmark. In this paper, we present a large-scale object retrieval system. The user supplies a query object by selecting a region of a query image, and the system returns a ranked list of images that contain the same object, retrieved from a large corpus. We demonstrate the scalability and performance of our system on a dataset of over 1 million images crawled from the photo-sharing site, Flickr [3], using Oxford landmarks as queries. Building an image-feature vocabulary is a major time and performance bottleneck, due to the size of our dataset. To address this problem we compare different scalable methods for building a vocabulary and introduce a novel quantization method based on randomized trees which we show outperforms the current state-of-the-art on an extensive ground-truth. Our experiments show that the quantization has a major effect on retrieval quality. To further improve query performance, we add an efficient spatial verification stage to re-rank the results returned from our bag-of-words model and show that this consistently improves search quality, though by less of a margin when the visual vocabulary is large. We view this work as a promising step towards much larger, "web-scale " image corpora. This article improves recent methods for large scale image search. We first analyze the bag-of-features approach in the framework of approximate nearest neighbor search. This leads us to derive a more precise representation based on Hamming embedding (HE) and weak geometric consistency constraints (WGC). HE provides binary signatures that refine the matching based on visual words. WGC filters matching descriptors that are not consistent in terms of angle and scale. HE and WGC are integrated within an inverted file and are efficiently exploited for all images in the dataset. We then introduce a graph-structured quantizer which significantly speeds up the assignment of the descriptors to visual words. A comparison with the state of the art shows the interest of our approach when high accuracy is needed. Experiments performed on three reference datasets and a dataset of one million of images show a significant improvement due to the binary signature and the weak geometric consistency constraints, as well as their efficiency. Estimation of the full geometric transformation, i.e., a re-ranking step on a short-list of images, is shown to be complementary to our weak geometric consistency constraints. Our approach is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art on the three datasets. Within the field of pattern classification, the Fisher kernel is a powerful framework which combines the strengths of generative and discriminative approaches. The idea is to characterize a signal with a gradient vector derived from a generative probability model and to subsequently feed this representation to a discriminative classifier. We propose to apply this framework to image categorization where the input signals are images and where the underlying generative model is a visual vocabulary: a Gaussian mixture model which approximates the distribution of low-level features in images. We show that Fisher kernels can actually be understood as an extension of the popular bag-of-visterms. Our approach demonstrates excellent performance on two challenging databases: an in-house database of 19 object scene categories and the recently released VOC 2006 database. It is also very practical: it has low computational needs both at training and test time and vocabularies trained on one set of categories can be applied to another set without any significant loss in performance. Most effective particular object and image retrieval approaches are based on the bag-of-words (BoW) model. All state-of-the-art retrieval results have been achieved by methods that include a query expansion that brings a significant boost in performance. We introduce three extensions to automatic query expansion: (i) a method capable of preventing tf-idf failure caused by the presence of sets of correlated features (confusers), (ii) an improved spatial verification and re-ranking step that incrementally builds a statistical model of the query object and (iii) we learn relevant spatial context to boost retrieval performance. The three improvements of query expansion were evaluated on standard Paris and Oxford datasets according to a standard protocol, and state-of-the-art results were achieved. This paper addresses the construction of a short-vector (128D) image representation for large-scale image and particular object retrieval. In particular, the method of joint dimensionality reduction of multiple vocabularies is considered. We study a variety of vocabulary generation techniques: different k-means initializations, different descriptor transformations, different measurement regions for descriptor extraction. Our extensive evaluation shows that different combinations of vocabularies, each partitioning the descriptor space in a different yet complementary manner, results in a significant performance improvement, which exceeds the state-of-the-art. We address the problem of image search on a very large scale, where three constraints have to be considered jointly: the accuracy of the search, its efficiency, and the memory usage of the representation. We first propose a simple yet efficient way of aggregating local image descriptors into a vector of limited dimension, which can be viewed as a simplification of the Fisher kernel representation. We then show how to jointly optimize the dimension reduction and the indexing algorithm, so that it best preserves the quality of vector comparison. The evaluation shows that our approach significantly outperforms the state of the art: the search accuracy is comparable to the bag-of-features approach for an image representation that fits in 20 bytes. Searching a 10 million image dataset takes about 50ms. Given a query image of an object, our objective is to retrieve all instances of that object in a large (1M+) image database. We adopt the bag-of-visual-words architecture which has proven successful in achieving high precision at low recall. Unfortunately, feature detection and quantization are noisy processes and this can result in variation in the particular visual words that appear in different images of the same object, leading to missed results. In the text retrieval literature a standard method for improving performance is query expansion. A number of the highly ranked documents from the original query are reissued as a new query. In this way, additional relevant terms can be added to the query. This is a form of blind rele- vance feedback and it can fail if 'outlier' (false positive) documents are included in the reissued query. In this paper we bring query expansion into the visual domain via two novel contributions. Firstly, strong spatial constraints between the query image and each result allow us to accurately verify each return, suppressing the false positives which typically ruin text-based query expansion. Secondly, the verified images can be used to learn a latent feature model to enable the controlled construction of expanded queries. We illustrate these ideas on the 5000 annotated image Oxford building database together with more than 1M Flickr images. We show that the precision is substantially boosted, achieving total recall in many cases.