As a scene graph compactly summarizes the high-level content of an image in a structured and symbolic manner, the similarity between scene graphs of two images reflects the relevance of their contents. Based on this idea, we propose a novel approach for image-to-image retrieval using scene graph similarity measured by graph neural networks. In our approach, graph neural networks are trained to predict the proxy image relevance measure, computed from human-annotated captions using a pre-trained sentence similarity model. We collect and publish the dataset for image relevance measured by human annotators to evaluate retrieval algorithms. The collected dataset shows that our method agrees well with the human perception of image similarity than other competitive baselines.
Scene graphs are a powerful structured representation of the underlying content of images, and embeddings derived from them have been shown to be useful in multiple downstream tasks. In this work, we employ a graph convolutional network to exploit structure in scene graphs and produce image embeddings useful for semantic image retrieval. Different from classification-centric supervision traditionally available for learning image representations, we address the task of learning from relative similarity labels in a ranking context. Rooted within the contrastive learning paradigm, we propose a no…
University of California, Santa Cruz（加利福尼亚大学圣克鲁兹分校）；Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）
A structured query can capture the complexity of object interactions (e.g. 'woman rides motorcycle') unlike single objects (e.g. 'woman' or 'motorcycle'). Retrieval using structured queries therefore is much more useful than single object retrieval, but a much more challenging problem. In this paper we present a method which uses scene graph embeddings as the basis for an approach to image retrieval. We examine how visual relationships, derived from scene graphs, can be used as structured queries. The visual relationships are directed subgraphs of the scene graph with a subject and object as n…
Face image retrieval, which searches for images of the same identity from the query input face image, is drawing more attention as the size of the image database increases rapidly. In order to conduct fast and accurate retrieval, a compact hash code-based methods have been proposed, and recently, deep face image hashing methods with supervised classification training have shown outstanding performance. However, classification-based scheme has a disadvantage in that it cannot reveal complex similarities between face images into the hash code learning. In this paper, we attempt to improve the fa…
Cluster-Aware Similarity Diffusion for Instance Retrieval
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Deep supervised hashing for image retrieval has attracted researchers' attention due to its high efficiency and superior retrieval performance. Most existing deep supervised hashing works, which are based on pairwise/triplet labels, suffer from the expensive computational cost and insufficient utilization of the semantics information. Recently, deep classwise hashing introduced a classwise loss supervised by class labels information alternatively; however, we find it still has its drawback. In this paper, we propose an improved deep classwise hashing, which enables hashing learning and class c…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Zhejiang Gongshang University（浙江工商大学）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Research Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
This paper aims for the language-based product image retrieval task. The majority of previous works have made significant progress by designing network structure, similarity measurement, and loss function. However, they typically perform vision-text matching at certain granularity regardless of the intrinsic multiple granularities of images. In this paper, we focus on the cross-modal similarity measurement, and propose a novel Hierarchical Similarity Learning (HSL) network. HSL first learns multi-level representations of input data by stacked encoders, and object-granularity similarity and ima…
Measuring visual similarity between two or more instances within a data distribution is a fundamental task in image retrieval. Theoretically, non-metric distances are able to generate a more complex and accurate similarity model than metric distances, provided that the non-linear data distribution is precisely captured by the system. In this work, we explore neural networks models for learning a non-metric similarity function for instance search. We argue that non-metric similarity functions based on neural networks can build a better model of human visual perception than standard metric dista…
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…
Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Image retrieval has been a top topic in the field of both computer vision and machine learning for a long time. Content based image retrieval, which tries to retrieve images from a database visually similar to a query image, has attracted much attention. Two most important issues of image retrieval are the representation and ranking of the images. Recently, bag-of-words based method has shown its power as a representation method. Moreover, nonnegative matrix factorization is also a popular way to represent the data samples. In addition, contextual similarity learning has also been studied and …
Hue University（顺化大学）；HoChiMinh city University of Food Industry（胡志明市食品工业大学）
The paper approaches the binary signature for each image based on the percentage of the pixels in each color images, at the same time the paper builds a similar measure between images based on EMD (Earth Mover's Distance). Besides, the paper proceeded to create the S-tree based on the similar measure EMD to store the image's binary signatures to quickly query image signature data. From there, the paper build an image retrieval algorithm and CBIR (Content-Based Image Retrieval) based on a similar measure EMD and S-tree. Based on this theory, the paper proceeded to build application and experime…
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 …
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…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Brookhaven National Laboratory（布鲁克海文国家实验室）；Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
Hash coding has been widely used in the approximate nearest neighbor search for large-scale image retrieval. Recently, many deep hashing methods have been proposed and shown largely improved performance over traditional feature-learning-based methods. Most of these methods examine the pairwise similarity on the semantic-level labels, where the pairwise similarity is generally defined in a hard-assignment way. That is, the pairwise similarity is '1' if they share no less than one class label and '0' if they do not share any. However, such similarity definition cannot reflect the similarity rank…
School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学计算机科学与电子工程学院）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学电气工程与计算机科学学院）
Visual navigation localizes a query place image against a reference database of place images, also known as a `visual map'. Localization accuracy requirements for specific areas of the visual map, `scene classes', vary according to the context of the environment and task. State-of-the-art visual mapping is unable to reflect these requirements by explicitly targetting scene classes for inclusion in the map. Four different scene classes, including pedestrian crossings and stations, are identified in each of the Nordland and St. Lucia datasets. Instead of re-training separate scene classifiers wh…
Deep neural networks trained for classification have been found to learn powerful image representations, which are also often used for other tasks such as comparing images w.r.t. their visual similarity. However, visual similarity does not imply semantic similarity. In order to learn semantically discriminative features, we propose to map images onto class embeddings whose pair-wise dot products correspond to a measure of semantic similarity between classes. Such an embedding does not only improve image retrieval results, but could also facilitate integrating semantics for other tasks, e.g., n…
Spatial relationships between objects provide important information for text-based image retrieval. As users are more likely to describe a scene from a real world perspective, using 3D spatial relationships rather than 2D relationships that assume a particular viewing direction, one of the main challenges is to infer the 3D structure that bridges images with users' text descriptions. However, direct inference of 3D structure from images requires learning from large scale annotated data. Since interactions between objects can be reduced to a limited set of atomic spatial relations in 3D, we stu…
Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence（感知与交互智能中心）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Deep hashing has been widely applied to large-scale image retrieval by encoding high-dimensional data points into binary codes for efficient retrieval. Compared with pairwise/triplet similarity based hash learning, central similarity based hashing can more efficiently capture the global data distribution. For multi-label image retrieval, however, previous methods only use multiple hash centers with equal weights to generate one centroid as the learning target, which ignores the relationship between the weights of hash centers and the proportion of instance regions in the image. To address the …
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…
FZI Research Center for Information Technology（FZI信息技术研究中心）；KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Examining graphs for similarity is a well-known challenge, but one that is mandatory for grouping graphs together. We present a data-driven method to cluster traffic scenes that is self-supervised, i.e. without manual labelling. We leverage the semantic scene graph model to create a generic graph embedding of the traffic scene, which is then mapped to a low-dimensional embedding space using a Siamese network, in which clustering is performed. In the training process of our novel approach, we augment existing traffic scenes in the Cartesian space to generate positive similarity samples. This al…
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；Centerfield Corporation（Centerfield公司）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Shandong Medical College（山东医学高等专科学校）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；Soochow University（苏州大学）；California State University San Bernardino（加州州立大学圣贝纳迪诺分校）；Travelers Canada（旅行者加拿大公司）
In this paper we study the problem of content-based image retrieval. In this problem, the most popular performance measure is the top precision measure, and the most important component of a retrieval system is the similarity function used to compare a query image against a database image. However, up to now, there is no existing similarity learning method proposed to optimize the top precision measure. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel similarity learning method to maximize the top precision measure. We model this problem as a minimization problem with an objective function …
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Raytheon BBN Technologies（雷神BBN技术公司）；Tianjing University（天津大学）
To effectively retrieve objects from large corpus with high accuracy is a challenge task. In this paper, we propose a method that propagates visual feature level similarities on a Markov random field (MRF) to obtain a high level correspondence in image space for image pairs. The proposed correspondence between image pair reflects not only the similarity of low-level visual features but also the relations built through other images in the database and it can be easily integrated into the existing bag-of-visual-words(BoW) based systems to reduce the missing rate. We evaluate our method on the st…
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 …
Traditional image recognition involves identifying the key object in a portrait-type image with a single object focus (ILSVRC, AlexNet, and VGG). More recent approaches consider dense image recognition - segmenting an image with appropriate bounding boxes and performing image recognition within these bounding boxes (Semantic segmentation). The Visual Genome dataset [5] is an attempt to bridge these various approaches to a cohesive dataset for each subtask - bounding box generation, image recognition, captioning, and a new operation: scene graph generation. Our focus is on using such scene grap…
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras（马德拉斯印度理工学院）；IBM Research Labs, Bangalore（IBM研究院班加罗尔实验室）；Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay（孟买印度理工学院）
With the prolification of multimodal interaction in various domains, recently there has been much interest in text based image retrieval in the computer vision community. However most of the state of the art techniques model this problem in a purely neural way, which makes it difficult to incorporate pragmatic strategies in searching a large scale catalog especially when the search requirements are insufficient and the model needs to resort to an interactive retrieval process through multiple iterations of question-answering. Motivated by this, we propose a neural-symbolic approach for a one-s…
Linear perspective is widely used in landscape photography to create the impression of depth on a 2D photo. Automated understanding of linear perspective in landscape photography has several real-world applications, including aesthetics assessment, image retrieval, and on-site feedback for photo composition, yet adequate automated understanding has been elusive. We address this problem by detecting the dominant vanishing point and the associated line structures in a photo. However, natural landscape scenes pose great technical challenges because often the inadequate number of strong edges conv…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Guangdong University of Foreign Studies（广东外语外贸大学）；Western Kentucky University（西肯塔基大学）；Guilin University of Electronic Technology（桂林电子科技大学）
Fabric image retrieval is beneficial to many applications including clothing searching, online shopping and cloth modeling. Learning pairwise image similarity is of great importance to an image retrieval task. With the resurgence of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), recent works have achieved significant progresses via deep representation learning with metric embedding, which drives similar examples close to each other in a feature space, and dissimilar ones apart from each other. In this paper, we propose a novel embedding method termed focus ranking that can be easily unified into a CNN …
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
In order to retrieve unlabeled images by textual queries, cross-media similarity computation is a key ingredient. Although novel methods are continuously introduced, little has been done to evaluate these methods together with large-scale query log analysis. Consequently, how far have these methods brought us in answering real-user queries is unclear. Given baseline methods that compute cross-media similarity using relatively simple text/image matching, how much progress have advanced models made is also unclear. This paper takes a pragmatic approach to answering the two questions. Queries are…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心）
In content-based image retrieval, the first-round retrieval result by simple visual feature comparison may be unsatisfactory, which can be refined by visual re-ranking techniques. In image retrieval, it is observed that the contextual similarity among the top-ranked images is an important clue to distinguish the semantic relevance. Inspired by this observation, in this paper, we propose a visual re-ranking method by contextual similarity aggregation with self-attention. In our approach, for each image in the top-K ranking list, we represent it into an affinity feature vector by comparing it wi…
Lesion images are frequently taken in open-set settings. Because of this, the image data generated is extremely varied in nature.It is difficult for a convolutional neural network to find proper features and generalise well, as a result content based image retrieval (CBIR) system for lesion images are difficult to build. This paper explores this domain and proposes multiple similarity measures which uses Style Loss and Dice Coefficient via a novel similarity measure called I1-Score. Out of the CBIR similarity measures proposed, pure style loss approach achieves a remarkable accuracy increase o…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）
Deep hashing models have been proposed as an efficient method for large-scale similarity search. However, most existing deep hashing methods only utilize fine-level labels for training while ignoring the natural semantic hierarchy structure. This paper presents an effective method that preserves the classwise similarity of full-level semantic hierarchy for large-scale image retrieval. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our method helps improve the fine-level retrieval performance. Moreover, with the help of the semantic hierarchy, it can produce significantly better binary codes f…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）
In crowded scenes, detection and localization of abnormal behaviors is challenging in that high-density people make object segmentation and tracking extremely difficult. We associate the optical flows of multiple frames to capture short-term trajectories and introduce the histogram-based shape descriptor referred to as shape contexts to describe such short-term trajectories. Furthermore, we propose a K-NN similarity-based statistical model to detect anomalies over time and space, which is an unsupervised one-class learning algorithm requiring no clustering nor any prior assumption. Firstly, we…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；ICSI, Berkeley（伯克利国际计算机科学研究所）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Massachusetts, Lowell（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校）
In this paper, we address the task of natural language object retrieval, to localize a target object within a given image based on a natural language query of the object. Natural language object retrieval differs from text-based image retrieval task as it involves spatial information about objects within the scene and global scene context. To address this issue, we propose a novel Spatial Context Recurrent ConvNet (SCRC) model as scoring function on candidate boxes for object retrieval, integrating spatial configurations and global scene-level contextual information into the network. Our model…
Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）；AISIA Research Lab（AISIA研究实验室）；University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市科学大学）；Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City（越南胡志明市国家大学）
Conventional approaches to image-text retrieval mainly focus on indexing visual objects appearing in pictures but ignore the interactions between these objects. Such objects occurrences and interactions are equivalently useful and important in this field as they are usually mentioned in the text. Scene graph presentation is a suitable method for the image-text matching challenge and obtained good results due to its ability to capture the inter-relationship information. Both images and text are represented in scene graph levels and formulate the retrieval challenge as a scene graph matching cha…
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,…
Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷焦艾米利亚大学）
This paper presents a novel retrieval pipeline for video collections, which aims to retrieve the most significant parts of an edited video for a given query, and represent them with thumbnails which are at the same time semantically meaningful and aesthetically remarkable. Videos are first segmented into coherent and story-telling scenes, then a retrieval algorithm based on deep learning is proposed to retrieve the most significant scenes for a textual query. A ranking strategy based on deep features is finally used to tackle the problem of visualizing the best thumbnail. Qualitative and quant…
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 …
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}…
University of Bristol（布里斯托尔大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Current video retrieval efforts all found their evaluation on an instance-based assumption, that only a single caption is relevant to a query video and vice versa. We demonstrate that this assumption results in performance comparisons often not indicative of models' retrieval capabilities. We propose a move to semantic similarity video retrieval, where (i) multiple videos/captions can be deemed equally relevant, and their relative ranking does not affect a method's reported performance and (ii) retrieved videos/captions are ranked by their similarity to a query. We propose several proxies to e…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
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 represen…
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）
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…
Semantic-embedded Similarity Prototype for Scene Recognition
Shandong University（山东大学）；School of Control Science and Engineering（控制科学与工程学院）；Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Unmanned System, Ministry of Education（教育部智能无人系统工程研究中心）
