In this paper, we propose a multi-modal search engine for interior design that combines visual and textual queries. The goal of our engine is to retrieve interior objects, e.g. furniture or wall clocks, that share visual and aesthetic similarities with the query. Our search engine allows the user to take a photo of a room and retrieve with a high recall a list of items identical or visually similar to those present in the photo. Additionally, it allows to return other items that aesthetically and stylistically fit well together. To achieve this goal, our system blends the results obtained using textual and visual modalities. Thanks to this blending strategy, we increase the average style similarity score of the retrieved items by 11 . Our work is implemented as a Web-based application and it is planned to be opened to the public.
Successful applications of deep learning techniques in other computer vision applications have motivated researchers to apply those methods also to visual search. Although preliminary results did not seem promising due to lack of robustness to cropping, scaling and image clutter @cite_8 , later works proved potential of those methods in the domain of image-based retrieval. For instance, by incorporation of R-MAC technique @cite_24 image representation based on the outputs of convolutional neural networks could be computed in a fixed layout of spatial regions. Many other deep architectures were also proposed, such as siamese networks, and proved successful when applied to content-based image retrieval @cite_6 .
@cite_24 @cite_6 @cite_8
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Recently, image representation built upon Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been shown to provide effective descriptors for image search, outperforming pre-CNN features as short-vector representations. Yet such models are not compatible with geometry-aware re-ranking methods and still outperformed, on some particular object retrieval benchmarks, by traditional image search systems relying on precise descriptor matching, geometric re-ranking, or query expansion. This work revisits both retrieval stages, namely initial search and re-ranking, by employing the same primitive information derived from the CNN. We build compact feature vectors that encode several image regions without the need to feed multiple inputs to the network. Furthermore, we extend integral images to handle max-pooling on convolutional layer activations, allowing us to efficiently localize matching objects. The resulting bounding box is finally used for image re-ranking. As a result, this paper significantly improves existing CNN-based recognition pipeline: We report for the first time results competing with traditional methods on the challenging Oxford5k and Paris6k datasets. Popular sites like Houzz, Pinterest, and LikeThatDecor, have communities of users helping each other answer questions about products in images. In this paper we learn an embedding for visual search in interior design. Our embedding contains two different domains of product images: products cropped from internet scenes, and products in their iconic form. With such a multi-domain embedding, we demonstrate several applications of visual search including identifying products in scenes and finding stylistically similar products. To obtain the embedding, we train a convolutional neural network on pairs of images. We explore several training architectures including re-purposing object classifiers, using siamese networks, and using multitask learning. We evaluate our search quantitatively and qualitatively and demonstrate high quality results for search across multiple visual domains, enabling new applications in interior design.