Abstract Fabric image retrieval is beneficial to many applications including clothing searching, online shopping and cloth modeling. Learning pairwise image similarity is of great importance to an image retrieval task. With the resurgence of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), recent works have achieved significant progresses via deep representation learning with metric embedding, which drives similar examples close to each other in a feature space, and dissimilar ones apart from each other. In this paper, we propose a novel embedding method termed focus ranking that can be easily unified into a CNN for jointly learning image representations and metrics in the context of fine-grained fabric image retrieval. Focus ranking aims to rank similar examples higher than all dissimilar ones by penalizing ranking disorders via the minimization of the overall cost attributed to similar samples being ranked below dissimilar ones. At the training stage, training samples are organized into focus ranking units for efficient optimization. We build a large-scale fabric image retrieval dataset (FIRD) with about 25,000 images of 4300 fabrics, and test the proposed model on the FIRD dataset. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed model over existing metric embedding models.
Many algorithms rely critically on being given a good metric over their inputs. For instance, data can often be clustered in many "plausible" ways, and if a clustering algorithm such as K-means initially fails to find one that is meaningful to a user, the only recourse may be for the user to manually tweak the metric until sufficiently good clusters are found. For these and other applications requiring good metrics, it is desirable that we provide a more systematic way for users to indicate what they consider "similar." For instance, we may ask them to provide examples. In this paper, we present an algorithm that, given examples of similar (and, if desired, dissimilar) pairs of points in ℝn, learns a distance metric over ℝn that respects these relationships. Our method is based on posing metric learning as a convex optimization problem, which allows us to give efficient, local-optima-free algorithms. We also demonstrate empirically that the learned metrics can be used to significantly improve clustering performance. Matching people across non-overlapping camera views, known as person re-identification, is challenging due to the lack of spatial and temporal constraints and large visual appearance changes caused by variations in view angle, lighting, background clutter and occlusion. To address these challenges, most previous approaches aim to extract visual features that are both distinctive and stable under appearance changes. However, most visual features and their combinations under realistic conditions are neither stable nor distinctive thus should not be used indiscriminately. In this paper, we propose to formulate person re-identification as a distance learning problem, which aims to learn the optimal distance that can maximises matching accuracy regardless the choice of representation. To that end, we introduce a novel Probabilistic Relative Distance Comparison (PRDC) model, which differs from most existing distance learning methods in that, rather than minimising intra-class variation whilst maximising intra-class variation, it aims to maximise the probability of a pair of true match having a smaller distance than that of a wrong match pair. This makes our model more tolerant to appearance changes and less susceptible to model over-fitting. Extensive experiments are carried out to demonstrate that 1) by formulating the person re-identification problem as a distance learning problem, notable improvement on matching accuracy can be obtained against conventional person re-identification techniques, which is particularly significant when the training sample size is small; and 2) our PRDC outperforms not only existing distance learning methods but also alternative learning methods based on boosting and learning to rank. Learning the distance metric between pairs of examples is of great importance for learning and visual recognition. With the remarkable success from the state of the art convolutional neural networks, recent works have shown promising results on discriminatively training the networks to learn semantic feature embeddings where similar examples are mapped close to each other and dissimilar examples are mapped farther apart. In this paper, we describe an algorithm for taking full advantage of the training batches in the neural network training by lifting the vector of pairwise distances within the batch to the matrix of pairwise distances. This step enables the algorithm to learn the state of the art feature embedding by optimizing a novel structured prediction objective on the lifted problem. Additionally, we collected Online Products dataset: 120k images of 23k classes of online products for metric learning. Our experiments on the CUB-200-2011, CARS196, and Online Products datasets demonstrate significant improvement over existing deep feature embedding methods on all experimented embedding sizes with the GoogLeNet network. 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. This paper introduces Pairwise Constrained Component Analysis (PCCA), a new algorithm for learning distance metrics from sparse pairwise similarity dissimilarity constraints in high dimensional input space, problem for which most existing distance metric learning approaches are not adapted. PCCA learns a projection into a low-dimensional space where the distance between pairs of data points respects the desired constraints, exhibiting good generalization properties in presence of high dimensional data. The paper also shows how to efficiently kernelize the approach. PCCA is experimentally validated on two challenging vision tasks, face verification and person re-identification, for which we obtain state-of-the-art results. Abstract Person re-identification aims at matching individuals across multiple non-overlapping adjacent cameras. By condensing multiple gallery images of a person as a whole, we propose a novel method named Set-Label Model (SLM) to improve the performance of person re-identification under the multi-shot setting. Moreover, we utilize mutual-information to measure the relevance between query image and gallery sets. To decrease the computational complexity, we apply a Naive–Bayes Nearest-Neighbor algorithm to approximate the mutual-information value. To overcome the limitations of traditional linear metric learning, we further develop a deep non-linear metric learning (DeepML) approach based on Neighborhood Component Analysis and Deep Belief Network. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed approaches, SLM and DeepML, we have carried out extensive experiments on two challenging datasets i-LIDS and ETHZ. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods can obtain better performances compared with the state-of-the-art methods.