Unsupervised domain adaptation methods aim to alleviate performance degradation caused by domain-shift by learning domain-invariant representations. Existing deep domain adaptation methods focus on holistic feature alignment by matching source and target holistic feature distributions, without considering local features and their multi-mode statistics. We show that the learned local feature patterns are more generic and transferable and a further local feature distribution matching enables fine-grained feature alignment. In this paper, we present a method for learning domain-invariant local feature patterns and jointly aligning holistic and local feature statistics. Comparisons to the state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation methods on two popular benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach and its effectiveness on alleviating negative transfer.
 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. We describe an approach to object and scene retrieval which searches for and localizes all the occurrences of a user outlined object in a video. The object is represented by a set of viewpoint invariant region descriptors so that recognition can proceed successfully despite changes in viewpoint, illumination and partial occlusion. The temporal continuity of the video within a shot is used to track the regions in order to reject unstable regions and reduce the effects of noise in the descriptors. The analogy with text retrieval is in the implementation where matches on descriptors are pre-computed (using vector quantization), and inverted file systems and document rankings are used. The result is that retrieved is immediate, returning a ranked list of key frames shots in the manner of Google. The method is illustrated for matching in two full length feature films. We tackle the problem of large scale visual place recognition, where the task is to quickly and accurately recognize the location of a given query photograph. We present the following three principal contributions. First, we develop a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that is trainable in an end-to-end manner directly for the place recognition task. The main component of this architecture, NetVLAD, is a new generalized VLAD layer, inspired by the "Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors" image representation commonly used in image retrieval. The layer is readily pluggable into any CNN architecture and amenable to training via backpropagation. Second, we develop a training procedure, based on a new weakly supervised ranking loss, to learn parameters of the architecture in an end-to-end manner from images depicting the same places over time downloaded from Google Street View Time Machine. Finally, we show that the proposed architecture significantly outperforms non-learnt image representations and off-the-shelf CNN descriptors on two challenging place recognition benchmarks, and improves over current state-of-the-art compact image representations on standard image retrieval benchmarks. Deep convolutional neural networks have been successfully applied to image classification tasks. When these same networks have been applied to image retrieval, the assumption has been made that the last layers would give the best performance, as they do in classification. We show that for instance-level image retrieval, lower layers often perform better than the last layers in convolutional neural networks. We present an approach for extracting convolutional features from different layers of the networks, and adopt VLAD encoding to encode features into a single vector for each image. We investigate the effect of different layers and scales of input images on the performance of convolutional features using the recent deep networks OxfordNet and GoogLeNet. Experiments demonstrate that intermediate layers or higher layers with finer scales produce better results for image retrieval, compared to the last layer. When using compressed 128-D VLAD descriptors, our method obtains state-of-the-art results and outperforms other VLAD and CNN based approaches on two out of three test datasets. Our work provides guidance for transferring deep networks trained on image classification to image retrieval tasks. 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.