The goal of this paper is to retrieve an image based on instance, attribute and category similarity notions. Different from existing works, which usually address only one of these entities in isolation, we introduce a cooperative embedding to integrate them while preserving their specific level of semantic representation. An algebraic structure defines a superspace filled with instances. Attributes are axis-aligned to form subspaces, while categories influence the arrangement of similar instances. These relationships enable them to cooperate for their mutual benefits for image retrieval. We derive a proxy-based softmax embedding loss to learn simultaneously all similarity measures in both superspace and subspaces. We evaluate our model on datasets from two different domains. Experiments on image retrieval tasks show the benefits of the cooperative embeddings for modeling multiple image similarities, and for discovering style evolution of instances between- and within-categories.
In this paper we introduce and experiment with a framework for learning local perceptual distance functions for visual recognition. We learn a distance function for each training image as a combination of elementary distances between patch-based visual features. We apply these combined local distance functions to the tasks of image retrieval and classification of novel images. On the Caltech 101 object recognition benchmark, we achieve 60.3 mean recognition across classes using 15 training images per class, which is better than the best published performance by Zhang, et al Recent advances in clothes recognition have been driven by the construction of clothes datasets. Existing datasets are limited in the amount of annotations and are difficult to cope with the various challenges in real-world applications. In this work, we introduce DeepFashion1, a large-scale clothes dataset with comprehensive annotations. It contains over 800,000 images, which are richly annotated with massive attributes, clothing landmarks, and correspondence of images taken under different scenarios including store, street snapshot, and consumer. Such rich annotations enable the development of powerful algorithms in clothes recognition and facilitating future researches. To demonstrate the advantages of DeepFashion, we propose a new deep model, namely FashionNet, which learns clothing features by jointly predicting clothing attributes and landmarks. The estimated landmarks are then employed to pool or gate the learned features. It is optimized in an iterative manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FashionNet and the usefulness of DeepFashion.  We propose to shift the goal of recognition from naming to describing. Doing so allows us not only to name familiar objects, but also: to report unusual aspects of a familiar object (“spotty dog”, not just “dog”); to say something about unfamiliar objects (“hairy and four-legged”, not just “unknown”); and to learn how to recognize new objects with few or no visual examples. Rather than focusing on identity assignment, we make inferring attributes the core problem of recognition. These attributes can be semantic (“spotty”) or discriminative (“dogs have it but sheep do not”). Learning attributes presents a major new challenge: generalization across object categories, not just across instances within a category. In this paper, we also introduce a novel feature selection method for learning attributes that generalize well across categories. We support our claims by thorough evaluation that provides insights into the limitations of the standard recognition paradigm of naming and demonstrates the new abilities provided by our attribute-based framework.  Attribute-based representation has shown great promises for visual recognition due to its intuitive interpretation and cross-category generalization property. However, human efforts are usually involved in the attribute designing process, making the representation costly to obtain. In this paper, we propose a novel formulation to automatically design discriminative "category-level attributes", which can be efficiently encoded by a compact category-attribute matrix. The formulation allows us to achieve intuitive and critical design criteria (category-separability, learn ability) in a principled way. The designed attributes can be used for tasks of cross-category knowledge transfer, achieving superior performance over well-known attribute dataset Animals with Attributes (AwA) and a large-scale ILSVRC2010 dataset (1.2M images). This approach also leads to state-of-the-art performance on the zero-shot learning task on AwA. Attributes were recently shown to give excellent results for category recognition. In this paper, we demonstrate their performance in the context of image retrieval. First, we show that retrieving images of particular objects based on attribute vectors gives results comparable to the state of the art. Second, we demonstrate that combining attribute and Fisher vectors improves performance for retrieval of particular objects as well as categories. Third, we implement an efficient coding technique for compressing the combined descriptor to very small codes. Experimental results on the Holidays dataset show that our approach significantly outperforms the state of the art, even for a very compact representation of 16 bytes per image. Retrieving category images is evaluated on the “web-queries” dataset. We show that attribute features combined with Fisher vectors improve the performance and that combined image features can supplement text features. We pose the recognition problem as data association. In this setting, a novel object is explained solely in terms of a small set of exemplar objects to which it is visually similar. Inspired by the work of , we learn separate distance functions for each exemplar; however, our distances are interpretable on an absolute scale and can be thresholded to detect the presence of an object. Our exemplars are represented as image regions and the learned distances capture the relative importance of shape, color, texture, and position features for that region. We use the distance functions to detect and segment objects in novel images by associating the bottom-up segments obtained from multiple image segmentations with the exemplar regions. We evaluate the detection and segmentation performance of our algorithm on real-world outdoor scenes from the LabelMe (B. Russel, et al, 2007) dataset and also show some promising qualitative image parsing results. In this article, we focus on the problem of large-scale instance-level image retrieval. For efficiency reasons, it is common to represent an image by a fixed-length descriptor which is subsequently encoded into a small number of bits. We note that most encoding techniques include an unsupervised dimensionality reduction step. Our goal in this work is to learn a better subspace in a supervised manner. We especially raise the following question: "can category-level labels be used to learn such a subspace?" To answer this question, we experiment with four learning techniques: the first one is based on a metric learning framework, the second one on attribute representations, the third one on Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and the fourth one on Joint Subspace and Classifier Learning (JSCL). While the first three approaches have been applied in the past to the image retrieval problem, we believe we are the first to show the usefulness of JSCL in this context. In our experiments, we use ImageNet as a source of category-level labels and report retrieval results on two standard dataseis: INRIA Holidays and the University of Kentucky benchmark. Our experimental study shows that metric learning and attributes do not lead to any significant improvement in retrieval accuracy, as opposed to CCA and JSCL. As an example, we report on Holidays an increase in accuracy from 39.3 to 48.6 with 32-dimensional representations. Overall JSCL is shown to yield the best results. This paper aims for generic instance search from one example where the instance can be an arbitrary 3D object like shoes, not just near-planar and one-sided instances like buildings and logos. Firstly, we evaluate state-of-the-art instance search methods on this problem. We observe that what works for buildings loses its generality on shoes. Secondly, we propose to use automatically learned category-specific attributes to address the large appearance variations present in generic instance search. On the problem of searching among instances from the same category as the query, the category-specific attributes outperform existing approaches by a large margin. On a shoe dataset containing 6624 shoe images recorded from all viewing angles, we improve the performance from 36.73 to 56.56 using category-specific attributes. Thirdly, we extend our methods to search objects without restricting to the specifically known category. We show the combination of category-level information and the category-specific attributes is superior to combining category-level information with low-level features such as Fisher vector.   We propose a new learning method to infer a mid-level feature representation that combines the advantage of semantic attribute representations with the higher expressive power of non-semantic features. The idea lies in augmenting an existing attribute-based representation with additional dimensions for which an autoencoder model is coupled with a large-margin principle. This construction allows a smooth transition between the zero-shot regime with no training example, the unsupervised regime with training examples but without class labels, and the supervised regime with training examples and with class labels. The resulting optimization problem can be solved efficiently, because several of the necessity steps have closed-form solutions. Through extensive experiments we show that the augmented representation achieves better results in terms of object categorization accuracy than the semantic representation alone. To learn a new visual category from few examples, prior knowledge from unlabeled data as well as previous related categories may be useful. We develop a new method for transfer learning which exploits available unlabeled data and an arbitrary kernel function; we form a representation based on kernel distances to a large set of unlabeled data points. To transfer knowledge from previous related problems we observe that a category might be learnable using only a small subset of reference prototypes. Related problems may share a significant number of relevant prototypes; we find such a concise representation by performing a joint loss minimization over the training sets of related problems with a shared regularization penalty that minimizes the total number of prototypes involved in the approximation. This optimization problem can be formulated as a linear program that can be solved efficiently. We conduct experiments on a news-topic prediction task where the goal is to predict whether an image belongs to a particular news topic. Our results show that when only few examples are available for training a target topic, leveraging knowledge learnt from other topics can significantly improve performance. Concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world. Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to recognize and understand new objects and events. Concepts are also relevant to understanding domains such as social situations, personality types, and even artistic styles. Yet like other phenomenologically simple cognitive processes such as walking or understanding speech, concept formation and use are maddeningly complex. Research since the 1970s and the decline of the "classical view" of concepts have greatly illuminated the psychology of concepts. But persistent theoretical disputes have sometimes obscured this progress. The Big Book of Concepts goes beyond those disputes to reveal the advances that have been made, focusing on the major empirical discoveries. By reviewing and evaluating research on diverse topics such as category learning, word meaning, conceptual development in infants and children, and the basic level of categorization, the book develops a much broader range of criteria than is usual for evaluating theories of concepts.