Scene text instances found in natural images carry explicit semantic information that can provide important cues to solve a wide array of computer vision problems. In this paper, we focus on leveraging multi-modal content in the form of visual and textual cues to tackle the task of fine-grained image classification and retrieval. First, we obtain the text instances from images by employing a text reading system. Then, we combine textual features with salient image regions to exploit the complementary information carried by the two sources. Specifically, we employ a Graph Convolutional Network to perform multi-modal reasoning and obtain relationship-enhanced features by learning a common semantic space between salient objects and text found in an image. By obtaining an enhanced set of visual and textual features, the proposed model greatly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art in two different tasks, fine-grained classification and image retrieval in the Con-Text and Drink Bottle datasets.
Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；University of Texas at San Antonio（德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥分校）
Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC) has achieved significant progress recently. However, the number of fine-grained species could be huge and dynamically increasing in real scenarios, making it difficult to recognize unseen objects under the current FGVC framework. This raises an open issue to perform large-scale fine-grained identification without a complete training set. Aiming to conquer this issue, we propose a retrieval task named One-Shot Fine-Grained Instance Retrieval (OSFGIR). "One-Shot" denotes the ability of identifying unseen objects through a fine-grained retrieval task assi…
Deep convolutional neural network models pre-trained for the ImageNet classification task have been successfully adopted to tasks in other domains, such as texture description and object proposal generation, but these tasks require annotations for images in the new domain. In this paper, we focus on a novel and challenging task in the pure unsupervised setting: fine-grained image retrieval. Even with image labels, fine-grained images are difficult to classify, let alone the unsupervised retrieval task. We propose the Selective Convolutional Descriptor Aggregation (SCDA) method. SCDA firstly lo…
Large-scale fine-grained image retrieval has two main problems. First, low dimensional feature embedding can fasten the retrieval process but bring accuracy reduce due to overlooking the feature of significant attention regions of images in fine-grained datasets. Second, fine-grained images lead to the same category query hash codes mapping into the different cluster in database hash latent space. To handle these two issues, we propose a feature consistency driven attention erasing network (FCAENet) for fine-grained image retrieval. For the first issue, we propose an adaptive augmentation modu…
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）
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）
TIReID aims to retrieve the image corresponding to the given text query from a pool of candidate images. Existing methods employ prior knowledge from single-modality pre-training to facilitate learning, but lack multi-modal correspondences. Besides, due to the substantial gap between modalities, existing methods embed the original modal features into the same latent space for cross-modal alignment. However, feature embedding may lead to intra-modal information distortion. Recently, CLIP has attracted extensive attention from researchers due to its powerful semantic concept learning capacity an…
Text contained in an image carries high-level semantics that can be exploited to achieve richer image understanding. In particular, the mere presence of text provides strong guiding content that should be employed to tackle a diversity of computer vision tasks such as image retrieval, fine-grained classification, and visual question answering. In this paper, we address the problem of fine-grained classification and image retrieval by leveraging textual information along with visual cues to comprehend the existing intrinsic relation between the two modalities. The novelty of the proposed model …
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…
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…
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…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
In this paper, we propose Suppression-Enhancing Mask based attention and Interactive Channel transformatiON (SEMICON) to learn binary hash codes for dealing with large-scale fine-grained image retrieval tasks. In SEMICON, we first develop a suppression-enhancing mask (SEM) based attention to dynamically localize discriminative image regions. More importantly, different from existing attention mechanism simply erasing previous discriminative regions, our SEM is developed to restrain such regions and then discover other complementary regions by considering the relation between activated regions …
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) addresses the problem of retrieving a particular photo instance given a user's query sketch. Its widespread applicability is however hindered by the fact that drawing a sketch takes time, and most people struggle to draw a complete and faithful sketch. In this paper, we reformulate the conventional FG-SBIR framework to tackle these challenges, with the ultimate goal of retrieving the target photo with the least number of strokes possible. We further propose an on-the-fly design that starts retrieving as soon as the user starts drawing. To acc…
Composed Image Retrieval with Text Feedback via Multi-grained Uncertainty Regularization
Sea-NExT Joint Lab, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学 Sea-NExT 联合实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Faculty of Science and Technology, and Institute of Collaborative Innovation, University of Macau（澳门大学科技学院及协同创新研究院）
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）
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…
Fine-grained image hashing is a challenging problem due to the difficulties of discriminative region localization and hash code generation. Most existing deep hashing approaches solve the two tasks independently. While these two tasks are correlated and can reinforce each other. In this paper, we propose a deep fine-grained hashing to simultaneously localize the discriminative regions and generate the efficient binary codes. The proposed approach consists of a region localization module and a hash coding module. The region localization module aims to provide informative regions to the hash cod…
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…
In this paper, we consider the problem of fine-grained image retrieval in an incremental setting, when new categories are added over time. On the one hand, repeatedly training the representation on the extended dataset is time-consuming. On the other hand, fine-tuning the learned representation only with the new classes leads to catastrophic forgetting. To this end, we propose an incremental learning method to mitigate retrieval performance degradation caused by the forgetting issue. Without accessing any samples of the original classes, the classifier of the original network provides soft "la…
RFHNet: Relational and Frequency-Aware Hashing Network for Large-Scale Fine-Grained Food Image Retrieval
College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Ludong University（鲁东大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Zero-Shot Hashing aims at learning a hashing model that is trained only by instances from seen categories but can generate well to those of unseen categories. Typically, it is achieved by utilizing a semantic embedding space to transfer knowledge from seen domain to unseen domain. Existing efforts mainly focus on single-modal retrieval task, especially Image-Based Image Retrieval (IBIR). However, as a highlighted research topic in the field of hashing, cross-modal retrieval is more common in real world applications. To address the Cross-Modal Zero-Shot Hashing (CMZSH) retrieval task, we propos…
Fine-Grained Scene Image Classification with Modality-Agnostic Adapter
School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学学院）；Innovation Center of Calligraphy and Painting Creation Technology, MCT（中国传媒书画创作技术创新中心）；Videt Technology（维德科技）
FiRE: Enhancing MLLMs with Fine-Grained Context Learning for Complex Image Retrieval
Shandong University（山东大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Shandong Jianzhu University（山东建筑大学）
We tackle the cross-modal retrieval problem, where learning is only supervised by relevant multi-modal pairs in the data. Although the contrastive learning is the most popular approach for this task, it makes potentially wrong assumption that the instances in different pairs are automatically irrelevant. To address the issue, we propose a novel loss function that is based on self-labeling of the unknown semantic classes. Specifically, we aim to predict class labels of the data instances in each modality, and assign those labels to the corresponding instances in the other modality (i.e., swappi…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Existing sketch-analysis work studies sketches depicting static objects or scenes. In this work, we propose a novel cross-modal retrieval problem of fine-grained instance-level sketch-based video retrieval (FG-SBVR), where a sketch sequence is used as a query to retrieve a specific target video instance. Compared with sketch-based still image retrieval, and coarse-grained category-level video retrieval, this is more challenging as both visual appearance and motion need to be simultaneously matched at a fine-grained level. We contribute the first FG-SBVR dataset with rich annotations. We then i…
FineCIR: Explicit Parsing of Fine-Grained Modification Semantics for Composed Image Retrieval
School of Software, Shandong University（山东大学软件学院）；School of Data Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学数据科学学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）计算机科学与技术学院）
Image retrieval with hybrid-modality queries, also known as composing text and image for image retrieval (CTI-IR), is a retrieval task where the search intention is expressed in a more complex query format, involving both vision and text modalities. For example, a target product image is searched using a reference product image along with text about changing certain attributes of the reference image as the query. It is a more challenging image retrieval task that requires both semantic space learning and cross-modal fusion. Previous approaches that attempt to deal with both aspects achieve uns…
University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Representation learning for sketch-based image retrieval has mostly been tackled by learning embeddings that discard modality-specific information. As instances from different modalities can often provide complementary information describing the underlying concept, we propose a cross-attention framework for Vision Transformers (XModalViT) that fuses modality-specific information instead of discarding them. Our framework first maps paired datapoints from the individual photo and sketch modalities to fused representations that unify information from both modalities. We then decouple the input sp…
Recently, the cross-modal pre-training task has been a hotspot because of its wide application in various down-streaming researches including retrieval, captioning, question answering and so on. However, exiting methods adopt a one-stream pre-training model to explore the united vision-language representation for conducting cross-modal retrieval, which easily suffer from the calculation explosion. Moreover, although the conventional double-stream structures are quite efficient, they still lack the vital cross-modal interactions, resulting in low performances. Motivated by these challenges, we …
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）
We address the problem of cross-modal information retrieval in the domain of remote sensing. In particular, we are interested in two application scenarios: i) cross-modal retrieval between panchromatic (PAN) and multi-spectral imagery, and ii) multi-label image retrieval between very high resolution (VHR) images and speech based label annotations. Notice that these multi-modal retrieval scenarios are more challenging than the traditional uni-modal retrieval approaches given the inherent differences in distributions between the modalities. However, with the growing availability of multi-source …
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）
This paper presents a three-tier modality alignment approach to learning text-image joint embedding, coined as JEMA, for cross-modal retrieval of cooking recipes and food images. The first tier improves recipe text embedding by optimizing the LSTM networks with term extraction and ranking enhanced sequence patterns, and optimizes the image embedding by combining the ResNeXt-101 image encoder with the category embedding using wideResNet-50 with word2vec. The second tier modality alignment optimizes the textual-visual joint embedding loss function using a double batch-hard triplet loss with soft…
Sketch as an image search query is an ideal alternative to text in capturing the fine-grained visual details. Prior successes on fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) have demonstrated the importance of tackling the unique traits of sketches as opposed to photos, e.g., temporal vs. static, strokes vs. pixels, and abstract vs. pixel-perfect. In this paper, we study a further trait of sketches that has been overlooked to date, that is, they are hierarchical in terms of the levels of detail -- a person typically sketches up to various extents of detail to depict an object. This hier…
With benefits of fast query speed and low storage cost, hashing-based image retrieval approaches have garnered considerable attention from the research community. In this paper, we propose a novel Error-Corrected Deep Cross Modal Hashing (CMH-ECC) method which uses a bitmap specifying the presence of certain facial attributes as an input query to retrieve relevant face images from the database. In this architecture, we generate compact hash codes using an end-to-end deep learning module, which effectively captures the inherent relationships between the face and attribute modality. We also inte…
Attribute-Aware Deep Hashing with Self-Consistency for Large-Scale Fine-Grained Image Retrieval
Southeast University（东南大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Video-text retrieval has been a crucial and fundamental task in multi-modal research. The development of video-text retrieval has been considerably promoted by large-scale multi-modal contrastive pre-training, which primarily focuses on coarse-grained or fine-grained contrast. However, cross-grained contrast, which is the contrast between coarse-grained representations and fine-grained representations, has rarely been explored in prior research. Compared with fine-grained or coarse-grained contrasts, cross-grained contrast calculate the correlation between coarse-grained features and each fine…
Cortexica Vision Systems Limited（Cortexica视觉系统有限公司）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning（澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；the University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
In this paper, we present a method for instance ranking and retrieval at fine-grained level based on the global features extracted from a multi-attribute recognition model which is not dependent on landmarks information or part-based annotations. Further, we make this architecture suitable for mobile-device application by adopting the bilinear CNN to make the multi-attribute recognition model smaller (in terms of the number of parameters). The experiments run on the Dress category of DeepFashion In-Shop Clothes Retrieval and CUB200 datasets show that the results of instance retrieval at fine-g…
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…
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；Naver Labs Europe（Naver欧洲实验室）
We address the problem of cross-modal fine-grained action retrieval between text and video. Cross-modal retrieval is commonly achieved through learning a shared embedding space, that can indifferently embed modalities. In this paper, we propose to enrich the embedding by disentangling parts-of-speech (PoS) in the accompanying captions. We build a separate multi-modal embedding space for each PoS tag. The outputs of multiple PoS embeddings are then used as input to an integrated multi-modal space, where we perform action retrieval. All embeddings are trained jointly through a combination of PoS…
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…
Boston University（波士顿大学）；Kuaishou Technology（快手科技）
Most existing methods in vision-language retrieval match two modalities by either comparing their global feature vectors which misses sufficient information and lacks interpretability, detecting objects in images or videos and aligning the text with fine-grained features which relies on complicated model designs, or modeling fine-grained interaction via cross-attention upon visual and textual tokens which suffers from inferior efficiency. To address these limitations, some recent works simply aggregate the token-wise similarities to achieve fine-grained alignment, but they lack intuitive expla…
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…
Adversarial Reconstruction Feedback for Robust Fine-grained Generalization
College of Computer and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学计算机与工程学院）；School of Software, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学软件学院）
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,…
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…
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.…
Self-paced Multi-grained Cross-modal Interaction Modeling for Referring Expression Comprehension
School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学软件学院）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Zhejiang University-University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Institute, Zhejiang University（浙江大学-伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校研究院）
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）
International School of Information Science & Engineering, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学国际信息科学与工程学院）；Huawei Cloud & AI（华为云与人工智能）；College of Computer and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学计算机与工程学院）；SenseTime Computer Vision Research Group, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学商汤计算机视觉研究组）
Fine-grained object retrieval aims to learn discriminative representation to retrieve visually similar objects. However, existing top-performing works usually impose pairwise similarities on the semantic embedding spaces or design a localization sub-network to continually fine-tune the entire model in limited data scenarios, thus resulting in convergence to suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we develop Fine-grained Retrieval Prompt Tuning (FRPT), which steers a frozen pre-trained model to perform the fine-grained retrieval task from the perspectives of sample prompting and feature adaptation…
