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 module in FCAENet, which is selective region erasing module (SREM). SREM makes the network more robust on subtle differences of fine-grained task by adaptively covering some regions of raw images. The feature extractor and hash layer can learn more representative hash code for fine-grained images by SREM. With regard to the second issue, we fully exploit the pair-wise similarity information and add the enhancing space relation loss (ESRL) in FCAENet to make the vulnerable relation stabler between the query hash code and database hash code. We conduct extensive experiments on five fine-grained benchmark datasets (CUB2011, Aircraft, NABirds, VegFru, Food101) for 12bits, 24bits, 32bits, 48bits hash code. The results show that FCAENet achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) fine-grained retrieval performance compared with other methods.
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…
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 …
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…
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 …
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）
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…
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）
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA)（中国科学院自动化研究所（CASIA））
In recent year, the compact representations based on activations of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) achieve remarkable performance in image retrieval. However, retrieval of some interested object that only takes up a small part of the whole image is still a challenging problem. Therefore, it is significant to extract the discriminative representations that contain regional information of the pivotal small object. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial soft-detection-based aggregation (ASDA) method free from bounding box annotations for image retrieval, based on adversarial detector a…
Learning Attribute-Aware Hash Codes for Fine-Grained Image Retrieval via Query Optimization
School of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology（新一代人工智能技术重点实验室）；Southeast University（东南大学）
ISTI - CNR（意大利国家研究委员会信息科学与技术研究所）；University of Geneva（日内瓦大学）
Despite the evolution of deep-learning-based visual-textual processing systems, precise multi-modal matching remains a challenging task. In this work, we tackle the task of cross-modal retrieval through image-sentence matching based on word-region alignments, using supervision only at the global image-sentence level. Specifically, we present a novel approach called Transformer Encoder Reasoning and Alignment Network (TERAN). TERAN enforces a fine-grained match between the underlying components of images and sentences, i.e., image regions and words, respectively, in order to preserve the inform…
Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）；University of California, Riverside（加利福尼亚大学河滨分校）
Fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) addresses the problem of retrieving a particular photo in a given query sketch. However, its widespread applicability is limited by the fact that it is difficult to draw a complete sketch for most people, and the drawing process often takes time. In this study, we aim to retrieve the target photo with the least number of strokes possible (incomplete sketch), named on-the-fly FG-SBIR (Bhunia et al. 2020), which starts retrieving at each stroke as soon as the drawing begins. We consider that there is a significant correlation among these incomp…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Victoria University of Wellington（惠灵顿维多利亚大学）
Sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) is challenging due to the inherent domain-gap between sketch and photo. Compared with pixel-perfect depictions of photos, sketches are iconic renderings of the real world with highly abstract. Therefore, matching sketch and photo directly using low-level visual clues are unsufficient, since a common low-level subspace that traverses semantically across the two modalities is non-trivial to establish. Most existing SBIR studies do not directly tackle this cross-modal problem. This naturally motivates us to explore the effectiveness of cross-modal retrieval met…
Graduate School of IPS, Waseda University（早稻田大学信息生产系统研究生院）；Megvii Research Nanjing, Megvii Technology（旷视科技南京研究院）
Retrieving content relevant images from a large-scale fine-grained dataset could suffer from intolerably slow query speed and highly redundant storage cost, due to high-dimensional real-valued embeddings which aim to distinguish subtle visual differences of fine-grained objects. In this paper, we study the novel fine-grained hashing topic to generate compact binary codes for fine-grained images, leveraging the search and storage efficiency of hash learning to alleviate the aforementioned problems. Specifically, we propose a unified end-to-end trainable network, termed as ExchNet. Based on atte…
Center for Research on Intelligent Perception and Computing (CRIPAC), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所智能感知与计算研究中心（CRIPAC））；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
There are great demands for automatically regulating inappropriate appearance of shocking firearm images in social media or identifying firearm types in forensics. Image retrieval techniques have great potential to solve these problems. To facilitate research in this area, we introduce Firearm 14k, a large dataset consisting of over 14,000 images in 167 categories. It can be used for both fine-grained recognition and retrieval of firearm images. Recent advances in image retrieval are mainly driven by fine-tuning state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks for retrieval task. The conventiona…
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）
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…
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）
A fundamental challenge faced by existing Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (FG-SBIR) models is the data scarcity -- model performances are largely bottlenecked by the lack of sketch-photo pairs. Whilst the number of photos can be easily scaled, each corresponding sketch still needs to be individually produced. In this paper, we aim to mitigate such an upper-bound on sketch data, and study whether unlabelled photos alone (of which they are many) can be cultivated for performances gain. In particular, we introduce a novel semi-supervised framework for cross-modal retrieval that can addi…
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）
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）
The recent focus on Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (FG-SBIR) has shifted towards generalising a model to new categories without any training data from them. In real-world applications, however, a trained FG-SBIR model is often applied to both new categories and different human sketchers, i.e., different drawing styles. Although this complicates the generalisation problem, fortunately, a handful of examples are typically available, enabling the model to adapt to the new category/style. In this paper, we offer a novel perspective -- instead of asking for a model that generalises, we a…
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 leverage CLIP for zero-shot sketch based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR). We are largely inspired by recent advances on foundation models and the unparalleled generalisation ability they seem to offer, but for the first time tailor it to benefit the sketch community. We put forward novel designs on how best to achieve this synergy, for both the category setting and the fine-grained setting ("all"). At the very core of our solution is a prompt learning setup. First we show just via factoring in sketch-specific prompts, we already have a category-level ZS-SBIR system that overshoots …
Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication. University of Milano - Bicocca（米兰比可卡大学信息学、系统与传播系）
In this paper we present an extensive evaluation of visual descriptors for the content-based retrieval of remote sensing (RS) images. The evaluation includes global hand-crafted, local hand-crafted, and Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs) features coupled with four different Content-Based Image Retrieval schemes. We conducted all the experiments on two publicly available datasets: the 21-class UC Merced Land Use/Land Cover (LandUse) dataset and 19-class High-resolution Satellite Scene dataset (SceneSat). The content of RS images might be quite heterogeneous, ranging from images containing fine…
Institute of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University（北京大学计算机科学技术研究所）
Hashing methods have attracted much attention for large scale image retrieval. Some deep hashing methods have achieved promising results by taking advantage of the strong representation power of deep networks recently. However, existing deep hashing methods treat all hash bits equally. On one hand, a large number of images share the same distance to a query image due to the discrete Hamming distance, which raises a critical issue of image retrieval where fine-grained rankings are very important. On the other hand, different hash bits actually contribute to the image retrieval differently, and …
Composed Object Retrieval: Object-level Retrieval via Composed Expressions
Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications, Southeast University, Ministry of Education, Jiangsu, China（新一代人工智能技术及跨学科应用国家重点实验室，东南大学，教育部，江苏，中国）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi, UAE（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学（MBZUAI），阿布扎赫德，阿联酋）
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…
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…
Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Remote sensing (RS) cross-modal text-image retrieval has attracted extensive attention for its advantages of flexible input and efficient query. However, traditional methods ignore the characteristics of multi-scale and redundant targets in RS image, leading to the degradation of retrieval accuracy. To cope with the problem of multi-scale scarcity and target redundancy in RS multimodal retrieval task, we come up with a novel asymmetric multimodal feature matching network (AMFMN). Our model adapts to multi-scale feature inputs, favors multi-source retrieval methods, and can dynamically filter r…
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）
Attributes Grouping and Mining Hashing for Fine-Grained Image Retrieval
Southeast University（东南大学）；Key Laboratory of Measurement and Control of Complex Systems of Engineering, Ministry of Education（教育部复杂工程系统测量与控制重点实验室）；Nanjing Enbo Technology Co., Ltd.（南京恩博科技有限公司）
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 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…
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…
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）
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…
State-Conditioned Visual Evidence Retrieval for Fine-Grained Perception in Document Vision-Language Models
College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）；Shanghai Innovation Institute（上海创新研究院）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；ByteDance, LarkAI（字节跳动 LarkAI）；Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing（上海智能信息处理重点实验室）
