With a growing demand for the search by image, many works have studied the task of fashion instance-level image retrieval (FIR). Furthermore, the recent works introduce a concept of fashion attribute manipulation (FAM) which manipulates a specific attribute (e.g color) of a fashion item while maintaining the rest of the attributes (e.g shape, and pattern). In this way, users can search not only "the same" items but also "similar" items with the desired attributes. FAM is a challenging task in that the attributes are hard to define, and the unique characteristics of a query are hard to be preserved. Although both FIR and FAM are important in real-life applications, most of the previous studies have focused on only one of these problem. In this study, we aim to achieve competitive performance on both FIR and FAM. To do so, we propose a novel method that converts a query into a representation with the desired attributes. We introduce a new idea of attribute manipulation at the feature level, by matching the distribution of manipulated features with real features. In this fashion, the attribute manipulation can be done independently from learning a representation from the image. By introducing the feature-level attribute manipulation, the previous methods for FIR can perform attribute manipulation without sacrificing their retrieval performance.
Cross domain image retrieval is a challenging task that implies matching images from one domain to their pairs from another domain. In this paper we focus on fashion image retrieval, which involves matching an image of a fashion item taken by users, to the images of the same item taken in controlled condition, usually by professional photographer. When facing this problem, we have different products in train and test time, and we use triplet loss to train the network. We stress the importance of proper training of simple architecture, as well as adapting general models to the specific task. In this paper, we address a practical problem of cross-scenario clothing retrieval — given a daily human photo captured in general environment, e.g., on street, finding similar clothing in online shops, where the photos are captured more professionally and with clean background. There are large discrepancies between daily photo scenario and online shopping scenario. We first propose to alleviate the human pose discrepancy by locating 30 human parts detected by a well trained human detector. Then, founded on part features, we propose a two-step calculation to obtain more reliable one-to-many similarities between the query daily photo and online shopping photos: 1) the within-scenario one-to-many similarities between a query daily photo and the auxiliary set are derived by direct sparse reconstruction; and 2) by a cross-scenario many-to-many similarity transfer matrix inferred offline from an extra auxiliary set and the online shopping set, the reliable cross-scenario one-to-many similarities between the query daily photo and all online shopping photos are obtained. We collect a large online shopping dataset and a daily photo dataset, both of which are thoroughly labeled with 15 clothing attributes via Mechanic Turk. The extensive experimental evaluations on the collected datasets well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for cross-scenario clothing retrieval. While deep learning has become a key ingredient in the top performing methods for many computer vision tasks, it has failed so far to bring similar improvements to instance-level image retrieval. In this article, we argue that reasons for the underwhelming results of deep methods on image retrieval are threefold: (1) noisy training data, (2) inappropriate deep architecture, and (3) suboptimal training procedure. We address all three issues. First, we leverage a large-scale but noisy landmark dataset and develop an automatic cleaning method that produces a suitable training set for deep retrieval. Second, we build on the recent R-MAC descriptor, show that it can be interpreted as a deep and differentiable architecture, and present improvements to enhance it. Last, we train this network with a siamese architecture that combines three streams with a triplet loss. At the end of the training process, the proposed architecture produces a global image representation in a single forward pass that is well suited for image retrieval. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms previous retrieval approaches, including state-of-the-art methods based on costly local descriptor indexing and spatial verification. On Oxford 5k, Paris 6k and Holidays, we respectively report 94.7, 96.6, and 94.8 mean average precision. Our representations can also be heavily compressed using product quantization with little loss in accuracy. Despite significant recent advances in the field of face recognition [10, 14, 15, 17], implementing face verification and recognition efficiently at scale presents serious challenges to current approaches. In this paper we present a system, called FaceNet, that directly learns a mapping from face images to a compact Euclidean space where distances directly correspond to a measure of face similarity. Once this space has been produced, tasks such as face recognition, verification and clustering can be easily implemented using standard techniques with FaceNet embeddings as feature vectors. Deep metric learning has gained much popularity in recent years, following the success of deep learning. However, existing frameworks of deep metric learning based on contrastive loss and triplet loss often suffer from slow convergence, partially because they employ only one negative example while not interacting with the other negative classes in each update. In this paper, we propose to address this problem with a new metric learning objective called multi-class N-pair loss. The proposed objective function firstly generalizes triplet loss by allowing joint comparison among more than one negative examples - more specifically, N-1 negative examples - and secondly reduces the computational burden of evaluating deep embedding vectors via an efficient batch construction strategy using only N pairs of examples, instead of (N+1) x N. We demonstrate the superiority of our proposed loss to the triplet loss as well as other competing loss functions for a variety of tasks on several visual recognition benchmark, including fine-grained object recognition and verification, image clustering and retrieval, and face verification and identification. We present a scalable approach to automatically suggest relevant clothing products, given a single image without metadata. We formulate the problem as cross-scenario retrieval: the query is a real-world image, while the products from online shopping catalogs are usually presented in a clean environment. We divide our approach into two main stages: a) Starting from articulated pose estimation, we segment the person area and cluster promising image regions in order to detect the clothing classes present in the query image. b) We use image retrieval techniques to retrieve visually similar products from each of the detected classes. We achieve clothing detection performance comparable to the state-of-the-art on a very recent annotated dataset, while being more than 50 times faster. Finally, we present a large scale clothing suggestion scenario, where the product database contains over one million products. Recent studies in image retrieval task have shown that ensembling different models and combining multiple global descriptors lead to performance improvement. However, training different models for ensemble is not only difficult but also inefficient with respect to time or memory. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that exploits multiple global descriptors to get an ensemble-like effect while it can be trained in an end-to-end manner. The proposed framework is flexible and expandable by the global descriptor, CNN backbone, loss, and dataset. Moreover, we investigate the effectiveness of combining multiple global descriptors with quantitative and qualitative analysis. Our extensive experiments show that the combined descriptor outperforms a single global descriptor, as it can utilize different types of feature properties. In the benchmark evaluation, the proposed framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the CARS196, CUB200-2011, In-shop Clothes and Stanford Online Products on image retrieval tasks by a large margin compared to competing approaches. Our model implementations and pretrained models are publicly available. Person re-identification (re-ID) is a highly challenging task due to large variations of pose, viewpoint, illumination, and occlusion. Deep metric learning provides a satisfactory solution to person re-ID by training a deep network under supervision of metric loss, e.g., triplet loss. However, the performance of deep metric learning is greatly limited by traditional sampling methods. To solve this problem, we propose a Hard-Aware Point-to-Set (HAP2S) loss with a soft hard-mining scheme. Based on the point-to-set triplet loss framework, the HAP2S loss adaptively assigns greater weights to harder samples. Several advantageous properties are observed when compared with other state-of-the-art loss functions: (1) Accuracy: HAP2S loss consistently achieves higher re-ID accuracies than other alternatives on three large-scale benchmark datasets; (2) Robustness: HAP2S loss is more robust to outliers than other losses; (3) Flexibility: HAP2S loss does not rely on a specific weight function, i.e., different instantiations of HAP2S loss are equally effective. (4) Generality: In addition to person re-ID, we apply the proposed method to generic deep metric learning benchmarks including CUB-200-2011 and Cars196, and also achieve state-of-the-art results. In this paper, we define a new task, Exact Street to Shop, where our goal is to match a real-world example of a garment item to the same item in an online shop. This is an extremely challenging task due to visual differences between street photos (pictures of people wearing clothing in everyday uncontrolled settings) and online shop photos (pictures of clothing items on people, mannequins, or in isolation, captured by professionals in more controlled settings). We collect a new dataset for this application containing 404,683 shop photos collected from 25 different online retailers and 20,357 street photos, providing a total of 39,479 clothing item matches between street and shop photos. We develop three different methods for Exact Street to Shop retrieval, including two deep learning baseline methods, and a method to learn a similarity measure between the street and shop domains. Experiments demonstrate that our learned similarity significantly outperforms our baselines that use existing deep learning based representations.