Image-text retrieval of natural scenes has been a popular research topic. Since image and text are heterogeneous cross-modal data, one of the key challenges is how to learn comprehensive yet unified representations to express the multi-modal data. A natural scene image mainly involves two kinds of visual concepts, objects and their relationships, which are equally essential to image-text retrieval. Therefore, a good representation should account for both of them. In the light of recent success of scene graph in many CV and NLP tasks for describing complex natural scenes, we propose to represent image and text with two kinds of scene graphs: visual scene graph (VSG) and textual scene graph (TSG), each of which is exploited to jointly characterize objects and relationships in the corresponding modality. The image-text retrieval task is then naturally formulated as cross-modal scene graph matching. Specifically, we design two particular scene graph encoders in our model for VSG and TSG, which can refine the representation of each node on the graph by aggregating neighborhood information. As a result, both object-level and relationship-level cross-modal features can be obtained, which favorably enables us to evaluate the similarity of image and text in the two levels in a more plausible way. We achieve state-of-the-art results on Flickr30k and MSCOCO, which verifies the advantages of our graph matching based approach for image-text retrieval.
Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）；NAVER LABS Europe（NAVER LABS 欧洲）
Recent models for cross-modal retrieval have benefited from an increasingly rich understanding of visual scenes, afforded by scene graphs and object interactions to mention a few. This has resulted in an improved matching between the visual representation of an image and the textual representation of its caption. Yet, current visual representations overlook a key aspect: the text appearing in images, which may contain crucial information for retrieval. In this paper, we first propose a new dataset that allows exploration of cross-modal retrieval where images contain scene-text instances. Then,…
Structured representations such as scene graphs serve as an efficient and compact representation that can be used for downstream rendering or retrieval tasks. However, existing efforts to generate realistic images from scene graphs perform poorly on scene composition for cluttered or complex scenes. We propose two contributions to improve the scene composition. First, we enhance the scene graph representation with heuristic-based relations, which add minimal storage overhead. Second, we use extreme points representation to supervise the learning of the scene composition network. These methods …
CR-JEPA: Cross-Modal Joint-Embedding Predictive Learning for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval
Space Applications Centre, Indian Space Research Organisation（印度空间研究组织空间应用中心）；Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买资源工程研究中心）
Visual appearance is considered to be the most important cue to understand images for cross-modal retrieval, while sometimes the scene text appearing in images can provide valuable information to understand the visual semantics. Most of existing cross-modal retrieval approaches ignore the usage of scene text information and directly adding this information may lead to performance degradation in scene text free scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a full transformer architecture to unify these cross-modal retrieval scenarios in a single $\textbf{Vi}$sion and $\textbf{S}$cene $\textbf{T}…
Faculty of Information Technology, Applied Science Private University（应用科学私立大学信息技术学院）
This paper addresses the problem of semantic-based image retrieval of natural scenes. A typical content-based image retrieval system deals with the query image and images in the dataset as a collection of low-level features and retrieves a ranked list of images based on the similarities between features of the query image and features of images in the image dataset. However, top ranked images in the retrieved list, which have high similarities to the query image, may be different from the query image in terms of the semantic interpretation of the user which is known as the semantic gap. In ord…
University of Insubria（因苏布里亚大学）；National University of Sciences and Technology（国立科技大学）
This paper proposes a cross-modal retrieval system that leverages on image and text encoding. Most multimodal architectures employ separate networks for each modality to capture the semantic relationship between them. However, in our work image-text encoding can achieve comparable results in terms of cross-modal retrieval without having to use a separate network for each modality. We show that text encodings can capture semantic relationships between multiple modalities. In our knowledge, this work is the first of its kind in terms of employing a single network and fused image-text embedding f…
SA-Person: Text-Based Person Retrieval with Scene-aware Re-ranking
School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University（苏州大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hong Kong Institute of Science and Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院香港创新研究院人工智能与机器人中心）；Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所多模态人工智能系统（MAIS））；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Rice University（莱斯大学）；Alibaba AI Labs（阿里巴巴人工智能实验室）
Textual-visual cross-modal retrieval has been a hot research topic in both computer vision and natural language processing communities. Learning appropriate representations for multi-modal data is crucial for the cross-modal retrieval performance. Unlike existing image-text retrieval approaches that embed image-text pairs as single feature vectors in a common representational space, we propose to incorporate generative processes into the cross-modal feature embedding, through which we are able to learn not only the global abstract features but also the local grounded features. Extensive experi…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Huawei Cloud & AI（华为云与人工智能）
Scene text retrieval aims to localize and search all text instances from an image gallery, which are the same or similar to a given query text. Such a task is usually realized by matching a query text to the recognized words, outputted by an end-to-end scene text spotter. In this paper, we address this problem by directly learning a cross-modal similarity between a query text and each text instance from natural images. Specifically, we establish an end-to-end trainable network, jointly optimizing the procedures of scene text detection and cross-modal similarity learning. In this way, scene tex…
Autonomous University of Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）
In this work we introduce a cross modal image retrieval system that allows both text and sketch as input modalities for the query. A cross-modal deep network architecture is formulated to jointly model the sketch and text input modalities as well as the the image output modality, learning a common embedding between text and images and between sketches and images. In addition, an attention model is used to selectively focus the attention on the different objects of the image, allowing for retrieval with multiple objects in the query. Experiments show that the proposed method performs the best i…
Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）
Textual information found in scene images provides high level semantic information about the image and its context and it can be leveraged for better scene understanding. In this paper we address the problem of scene text retrieval: given a text query, the system must return all images containing the queried text. The novelty of the proposed model consists in the usage of a single shot CNN architecture that predicts at the same time bounding boxes and a compact text representation of the words in them. In this way, the text based image retrieval task can be casted as a simple nearest neighbor …
The development of cross-modal retrieval systems that can search and retrieve semantically relevant data across different modalities based on a query in any modality has attracted great attention in remote sensing (RS). In this paper, we focus our attention on cross-modal text-image retrieval, where queries from one modality (e.g., text) can be matched to archive entries from another (e.g., image). Most of the existing cross-modal text-image retrieval systems in RS require a high number of labeled training samples and also do not allow fast and memory-efficient retrieval. These issues limit th…
University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；IBM Research AI（IBM研究院人工智能部门）
This paper explores the task of interactive image retrieval using natural language queries, where a user progressively provides input queries to refine a set of retrieval results. Moreover, our work explores this problem in the context of complex image scenes containing multiple objects. We propose Drill-down, an effective framework for encoding multiple queries with an efficient compact state representation that significantly extends current methods for single-round image retrieval. We show that using multiple rounds of natural language queries as input can be surprisingly effective to find a…
Due to the availability of large-scale multi-modal data (e.g., satellite images acquired by different sensors, text sentences, etc) archives, the development of cross-modal retrieval systems that can search and retrieve semantically relevant data across different modalities based on a query in any modality has attracted great attention in RS. In this paper, we focus our attention on cross-modal text-image retrieval, where queries from one modality (e.g., text) can be matched to archive entries from another (e.g., image). Most of the existing cross-modal text-image retrieval systems require a h…
Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering (CSRE), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校资源工程研究中心）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）
Conventional existing retrieval methods in remote sensing (RS) are often based on a uni-modal data retrieval framework. In this work, we propose a novel inter-modal triplet-based zero-shot retrieval scheme utilizing a sketch-based representation of RS data. The proposed scheme performs efficiently even when the sketch representations are marginally prototypical of the image. We conducted experiments on a new bi-modal image-sketch dataset called Earth on Canvas (EoC) conceived during this study. We perform a thorough bench-marking of this dataset and demonstrate that the proposed network outper…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；University of Maryland - Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）
People can recognize scenes across many different modalities beyond natural images. In this paper, we investigate how to learn cross-modal scene representations that transfer across modalities. To study this problem, we introduce a new cross-modal scene dataset. While convolutional neural networks can categorize cross-modal scenes well, they also learn an intermediate representation not aligned across modalities, which is undesirable for cross-modal transfer applications. We present methods to regularize cross-modal convolutional neural networks so that they have a shared representation that i…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Hashing has been widely applied to large-scale multimedia retrieval due to the storage and retrieval efficiency. Cross-modal hashing enables efficient retrieval from database of one modality in response to a query of another modality. Existing work on cross-modal hashing assumes heterogeneous relationship across modalities for hash function learning. In this paper, we relax the strong assumption by only requiring such heterogeneous relationship in an auxiliary dataset different from the query/database domain. We craft a hybrid deep architecture to simultaneously learn the cross-modal correlati…
Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam（越南国家大学，胡志明市，越南）；University of Information Technology, VNU-HCM, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam（信息技术大学，VNU-HCM，胡志明市，越南）
Cross-modal image-recipe retrieval has gained significant attention in recent years. Most work focuses on improving cross-modal embeddings using unimodal encoders, that allow for efficient retrieval in large-scale databases, leaving aside cross-attention between modalities which is more computationally expensive. We propose a new retrieval framework, T-Food (Transformer Decoders with MultiModal Regularization for Cross-Modal Food Retrieval) that exploits the interaction between modalities in a novel regularization scheme, while using only unimodal encoders at test time for efficient retrieval.…
Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology（塔帕尔工程技术学院）
This paper represents a cost-effective scene perception system aimed towards visually impaired individual. We use an odroid system integrated with an USB camera and USB laser that can be attached on the chest. The system classifies the detected objects along with its distance from the user and provides a voice output. Experimental results provided in this paper use outdoor traffic scenes. The object detection and classification framework exploits a multi-modal fusion based faster RCNN using motion, sharpening and blurring filters for efficient feature representation.
In tissue characterization and cancer diagnostics, multimodal imaging has emerged as a powerful technique. Thanks to computational advances, large datasets can be exploited to discover patterns in pathologies and improve diagnosis. However, this requires efficient and scalable image retrieval methods. Cross-modality image retrieval is particularly challenging, since images of similar (or even the same) content captured by different modalities might share few common structures. We propose a new application-independent content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system for reverse (sub-)image search ac…
Part-Whole Relational Fusion Towards Multi-Modal Scene Understanding
School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Changzhou University（常州大学计算机与人工智能学院）；Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学计算机系）
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Nowadays, customer's demands for E-commerce are more diversified, which introduces more complications to the product retrieval industry. Previous methods are either subject to single-modal input or perform supervised image-level product retrieval, thus fail to accommodate real-life scenarios where enormous weakly annotated multi-modal data are present. In this paper, we investigate a more realistic setting that aims to perform weakly-supervised multi-modal instance-level product retrieval among fine-grained product categories. To promote the study of this challenging task, we contribute Produc…
Multi-Modal Motion Retrieval by Learning a Fine-Grained Joint Embedding Space
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（深圳先进技术研究院，中国科学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Faculty of Computer Science and Control Engineering, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology（计算机科学与控制工程学院，深圳大学先进技术学院）
School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学信息科学技术学院）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
This work presents SeasoNet, a new large-scale multi-label land cover and land use scene understanding dataset. It includes $1\,759\,830$ images from Sentinel-2 tiles, with 12 spectral bands and patch sizes of up to $ 120 \ \mathrm{px} \times 120 \ \mathrm{px}$. Each image is annotated with large scale pixel level labels from the German land cover model LBM-DE2018 with land cover classes based on the CORINE Land Cover database (CLC) 2018 and a five times smaller minimum mapping unit (MMU) than the original CLC maps. We provide pixel synchronous examples from all four seasons, plus an additiona…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Honda Research Institute, USA（本田美国研究所）
We cast visual retrieval as a regression problem by posing triplet loss as a regression loss. This enables epistemic uncertainty estimation using dropout as a Bayesian approximation framework in retrieval. Accordingly, Monte Carlo (MC) sampling is leveraged to boost retrieval performance. Our approach is evaluated on two applications: person re-identification and autonomous car driving. Comparable state-of-the-art results are achieved on multiple datasets for the former application. We leverage the Honda driving dataset (HDD) for autonomous car driving application. It provides multiple modalit…
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；IBM Almaden Research Center（IBM阿尔马登研究中心）
This paper presents a new scalable algorithm for cross-modal similarity preserving retrieval in a learnt manifold space. Unlike existing approaches that compromise between preserving global and local geometries, the proposed technique respects both simultaneously during manifold alignment. The global topologies are maintained by recovering underlying mapping functions in the joint manifold space by deploying partially corresponding instances. The inter-, and intra-modality affinity matrices are then computed to reinforce original data skeleton using perturbed minimum spanning tree (pMST), and …
In this paper, we re-examine the task of cross-modal clip-sentence retrieval, where the clip is part of a longer untrimmed video. When the clip is short or visually ambiguous, knowledge of its local temporal context (i.e. surrounding video segments) can be used to improve the retrieval performance. We propose Context Transformer (ConTra); an encoder architecture that models the interaction between a video clip and its local temporal context in order to enhance its embedded representations. Importantly, we supervise the context transformer using contrastive losses in the cross-modal embedding s…
Cookpad Ltd.（Cookpad有限公司）；Facebook（脸书）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）
We propose a novel non-parametric method for cross-modal recipe retrieval which is applied on top of precomputed image and text embeddings. By combining our method with standard approaches for building image and text encoders, trained independently with a self-supervised classification objective, we create a baseline model which outperforms most existing methods on a challenging image-to-recipe task. We also use our method for comparing image and text encoders trained using different modern approaches, thus addressing the issues hindering the development of novel methods for cross-modal recipe…
Multimodal representations and continual learning are two areas closely related to human intelligence. The former considers the learning of shared representation spaces where information from different modalities can be compared and integrated (we focus on cross-modal retrieval between language and visual representations). The latter studies how to prevent forgetting a previously learned task when learning a new one. While humans excel in these two aspects, deep neural networks are still quite limited. In this paper, we propose a combination of both problems into a continual cross-modal retrie…
Indoor scene recognition is a growing field with great potential for behaviour understanding, robot localization, and elderly monitoring, among others. In this study, we approach the task of scene recognition from a novel standpoint, using multi-modal learning and video data gathered from social media. The accessibility and variety of social media videos can provide realistic data for modern scene recognition techniques and applications. We propose a model based on fusion of transcribed speech to text and visual features, which is used for classification on a novel dataset of social media vide…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Thanks to the success of deep learning, cross-modal retrieval has made significant progress recently. However, there still remains a crucial bottleneck: how to bridge the modality gap to further enhance the retrieval accuracy. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised adversarial hashing (\textbf{SSAH}) approach, which lies among the early attempts to incorporate adversarial learning into cross-modal hashing in a self-supervised fashion. The primary contribution of this work is that two adversarial networks are leveraged to maximize the semantic correlation and consistency of the representat…
An important component of human analysis of medical images and their context is the ability to relate newly seen things to related instances in our memory. In this paper we mimic this ability by using multi-modal retrieval augmentation and apply it to several tasks in chest X-ray analysis. By retrieving similar images and/or radiology reports we expand and regularize the case at hand with additional knowledge, while maintaining factual knowledge consistency. The method consists of two components. First, vision and language modalities are aligned using a pre-trained CLIP model. To enforce that …
Several recent approaches showed how the representations learned by Convolutional Neural Networks can be repurposed for novel tasks. Most commonly it has been shown that the activation features of the last fully connected layers (fc7 or fc6) of the network, followed by a linear classifier outperform the state-of-the-art on several recognition challenge datasets. Instead of recognition, this paper focuses on the image retrieval problem and proposes a examines alternative pooling strategies derived for CNN features. The presented scheme uses the features maps from an earlier layer 5 of the CNN a…
NAVER AI Lab（NAVER人工智能实验室）；NAVER LABS Europe（NAVER欧洲实验室）
Cross-modal retrieval methods build a common representation space for samples from multiple modalities, typically from the vision and the language domains. For images and their captions, the multiplicity of the correspondences makes the task particularly challenging. Given an image (respectively a caption), there are multiple captions (respectively images) that equally make sense. In this paper, we argue that deterministic functions are not sufficiently powerful to capture such one-to-many correspondences. Instead, we propose to use Probabilistic Cross-Modal Embedding (PCME), where samples fro…
Huaqiao University（华侨大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）
Hashing has recently sparked a great revolution in cross-modal retrieval because of its low storage cost and high query speed. Recent cross-modal hashing methods often learn unified or equal-length hash codes to represent the multi-modal data and make them intuitively comparable. However, such unified or equal-length hash representations could inherently sacrifice their representation scalability because the data from different modalities may not have one-to-one correspondence and could be encoded more efficiently by different hash codes of unequal lengths. To mitigate these problems, this pap…
Pre-training on large scale unlabelled datasets has shown impressive performance improvements in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing. Given the advent of large-scale instructional video datasets, a common strategy for pre-training video encoders is to use the accompanying speech as weak supervision. However, as speech is used to supervise the pre-training, it is never seen by the video encoder, which does not learn to process that modality. We address this drawback of current pre-training methods, which fail to exploit the rich cues in spoken language. Our proposal is…
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has achieved impressive results in single object scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis, which have been demonstrated on many single modality and single object focused indoor scene datasets like DTU, BMVS, and NeRF Synthetic.However, the study of NeRF on large-scale outdoor scene reconstruction is still limited, as there is no unified outdoor scene dataset for large-scale NeRF evaluation due to expensive data acquisition and calibration costs. In this paper, we propose a large-scale outdoor multi-modal dataset, OMMO dataset, containing complex land objects …
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；iFlyTek-Surrey Joint Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence（讯飞-萨里人工智能联合研究中心）
In this paper, we extend scene understanding to include that of human sketch. The result is a complete trilogy of scene representation from three diverse and complementary modalities -- sketch, photo, and text. Instead of learning a rigid three-way embedding and be done with it, we focus on learning a flexible joint embedding that fully supports the ``optionality" that this complementarity brings. Our embedding supports optionality on two axes: (i) optionality across modalities -- use any combination of modalities as query for downstream tasks like retrieval, (ii) optionality across tasks -- s…
The task of retrieving video content relevant to natural language queries plays a critical role in effectively handling internet-scale datasets. Most of the existing methods for this caption-to-video retrieval problem do not fully exploit cross-modal cues present in video. Furthermore, they aggregate per-frame visual features with limited or no temporal information. In this paper, we present a multi-modal transformer to jointly encode the different modalities in video, which allows each of them to attend to the others. The transformer architecture is also leveraged to encode and model the temp…
