Unsupervised image retrieval aims to learn an efficient retrieval system without expensive data annotations, but most existing methods rely heavily on handcrafted feature descriptors or pre-trained feature extractors. To minimize human supervision, recent advance proposes deep fully unsupervised image retrieval aiming at training a deep model from scratch to jointly optimize visual features and quantization codes. However, existing approach mainly focuses on instance contrastive learning without considering underlying semantic structure information, resulting in sub-optimal performance. In this work, we propose a novel self-supervised consistent quantization approach to deep fully unsupervised image retrieval, which consists of part consistent quantization and global consistent quantization. In part consistent quantization, we devise part neighbor semantic consistency learning with codeword diversity regularization. This allows to discover underlying neighbor structure information of sub-quantized representations as self-supervision. In global consistent quantization, we employ contrastive learning for both embedding and quantized representations and fuses these representations for consistent contrastive regularization between instances. This can make up for the loss of useful representation information during quantization and regularize consistency between instances. With a unified learning objective of part and global consistent quantization, our approach exploits richer self-supervision cues to facilitate model learning. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art methods.
Hashing has played a pivotal role in large-scale image retrieval. With the development of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), hashing learning has shown great promise. But existing methods are mostly tuned for classification, which are not optimized for retrieval tasks, especially for instance-level retrieval. In this study, we propose a novel hashing method for large-scale image retrieval. Considering the difficulty in obtaining labeled datasets for image retrieval task in large scale, we propose a novel CNN-based unsupervised hashing method, namely Unsupervised Triplet Hashing (UTH). The uns…
Image retrieval methods that employ hashing or vector quantization have achieved great success by taking advantage of deep learning. However, these approaches do not meet expectations unless expensive label information is sufficient. To resolve this issue, we propose the first quantization-based semi-supervised image retrieval scheme: Generalized Product Quantization (GPQ) network. We design a novel metric learning strategy that preserves semantic similarity between labeled data, and employ entropy regularization term to fully exploit inherent potentials of unlabeled data. Our solution increas…
Supervised deep learning-based hash and vector quantization are enabling fast and large-scale image retrieval systems. By fully exploiting label annotations, they are achieving outstanding retrieval performances compared to the conventional methods. However, it is painstaking to assign labels precisely for a vast amount of training data, and also, the annotation process is error-prone. To tackle these issues, we propose the first deep unsupervised image retrieval method dubbed Self-supervised Product Quantization (SPQ) network, which is label-free and trained in a self-supervised manner. We de…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）
For unsupervised data-dependent hashing, the two most important requirements are to preserve similarity in the low-dimensional feature space and to minimize the binary quantization loss. A well-established hashing approach is Iterative Quantization (ITQ), which addresses these two requirements in separate steps. In this paper, we revisit the ITQ approach and propose novel formulations and algorithms to the problem. Specifically, we propose a novel approach, named Simultaneous Compression and Quantization (SCQ), to jointly learn to compress (reduce dimensionality) and binarize input data in a s…
Orthonormal Product Quantization Network for Scalable Face Image Retrieval
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Centre for Intelligent Multidimensional Data Analysis Limited（智能多维数据分析中心有限公司）；Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute Company Limited（香港应用科技研究院有限公司）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search technique for high-dimensional feature indexing and retrieval is the crux of large-scale image retrieval. A recent promising technique is Product Quantization, which attempts to index high-dimensional image features by decomposing the feature space into a Cartesian product of low dimensional subspaces and quantizing each of them separately. Despite the promising results reported, their quantization approach follows the typical hard assignment of traditional quantization methods, which may result in large quantization errors and thus inferior searc…
We introduce an unsupervised formulation to estimate heteroscedastic uncertainty in retrieval systems. We propose an extension to triplet loss that models data uncertainty for each input. Besides improving performance, our formulation models local noise in the embedding space. It quantifies input uncertainty and thus enhances interpretability of the system. This helps identify noisy observations in query and search databases. Evaluation on both image and video retrieval applications highlight the utility of our approach. We highlight our efficiency in modeling local noise using two real-world …
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；PCL Research Center of Networks and Communications, Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室网络通信PCL研究中心）
Deep product quantization network (DPQN) has recently received much attention in fast image retrieval tasks due to its efficiency of encoding high-dimensional visual features especially when dealing with large-scale datasets. Recent studies show that deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to input with small and maliciously designed perturbations (a.k.a., adversarial examples). This phenomenon raises the concern of security issues for DPQN in the testing/deploying stage as well. However, little effort has been devoted to investigating how adversarial examples affect DPQN. To this end, we p…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Product Quantization (PQ) has long been a mainstream for generating an exponentially large codebook at very low memory/time cost. Despite its success, PQ is still tricky for the decomposition of high-dimensional vector space, and the retraining of model is usually unavoidable when the code length changes. In this work, we propose a deep progressive quantization (DPQ) model, as an alternative to PQ, for large scale image retrieval. DPQ learns the quantization codes sequentially and approximates the original feature space progressively. Therefore, we can train the quantization codes with differe…
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in many computer vision tasks. However, this achievement is preceded by extreme manual annotation in order to perform either training from scratch or fine-tuning for the target task. In this work, we propose to fine-tune CNN for image retrieval from a large collection of unordered images in a fully automated manner. We employ state-of-the-art retrieval and Structure-from-Motion (SfM) methods to obtain 3D models, which are used to guide the selection of the training data for CNN fine-tuning. We show that both hard positiv…
State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems（复杂系统管理与控制国家重点实验室）；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）
In this paper, we propose a simple but effective semantic part-based weighting aggregation (PWA) for image retrieval. The proposed PWA utilizes the discriminative filters of deep convolutional layers as part detectors. Moreover, we propose the effective unsupervised strategy to select some part detectors to generate the "probabilistic proposals", which highlight certain discriminative parts of objects and suppress the noise of background. The final global PWA representation could then be acquired by aggregating the regional representations weighted by the selected "probabilistic proposals" cor…
Current supervised cross-domain image retrieval methods can achieve excellent performance. However, the cost of data collection and labeling imposes an intractable barrier to practical deployment in real applications. In this paper, we investigate the unsupervised cross-domain image retrieval task, where class labels and pairing annotations are no longer a prerequisite for training. This is an extremely challenging task because there is no supervision for both in-domain feature representation learning and cross-domain alignment. We address both challenges by introducing: 1) a new cluster-wise …
College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机科学学院）；Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR), A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局前沿人工智能研究中心）
Cross-domain image retrieval aims at retrieving images across different domains to excavate cross-domain classificatory or correspondence relationships. This paper studies a less-touched problem of cross-domain image retrieval, i.e., unsupervised cross-domain image retrieval, considering the following practical assumptions: (i) no correspondence relationship, and (ii) no category annotations. It is challenging to align and bridge distinct domains without cross-domain correspondence. To tackle the challenge, we present a novel Correspondence-free Domain Alignment (CoDA) method to effectively el…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
The practical value of existing supervised sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) algorithms is largely limited by the requirement for intensive data collection and labeling. In this paper, we present the first attempt at unsupervised SBIR to remove the labeling cost (both category annotations and sketch-photo pairings) that is conventionally needed for training. Existing single-domain unsupervised representation learning methods perform poorly in this application, due to the unique cross-domain (sketch and photo) nature of the problem. We therefore introduce a novel framework that simultaneously…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学电子信息与通信学院）；Vector Institute（矢量研究所）；Peter Munk Cardiac Centre（彼得·蒙克心脏中心）
Diffusion has shown great success in improving accuracy of unsupervised image retrieval systems by utilizing high-order structures of image manifold. However, existing diffusion methods suffer from three major limitations: 1) they usually rely on local structures without considering global manifold information; 2) they focus on improving pair-wise similarities within existing images input output transductively while lacking flexibility to learn representations for novel unseen instances inductively; 3) they fail to scale to large datasets due to prohibitive memory consumption and computational…
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…
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学清华-深圳国际研究生院）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
The high efficiency in computation and storage makes hashing (including binary hashing and quantization) a common strategy in large-scale retrieval systems. To alleviate the reliance on expensive annotations, unsupervised deep hashing becomes an important research problem. This paper provides a novel solution to unsupervised deep quantization, namely Contrastive Quantization with Code Memory (MeCoQ). Different from existing reconstruction-based strategies, we learn unsupervised binary descriptors by contrastive learning, which can better capture discriminative visual semantics. Besides, we unc…
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…
Inria Grenoble Rhone-Alpes（法国国家信息与自动化研究所格勒诺布尔-罗讷阿尔卑斯分院）；Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann（让·孔茨曼实验室）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently received a lot of attention due to their ability to model local stationary structures in natural images in a multi-scale fashion, when learning all model parameters with supervision. While excellent performance was achieved for image classification when large amounts of labeled visual data are available, their success for un-supervised tasks such as image retrieval has been moderate so far. Our paper focuses on this latter setting and explores several methods for learning patch descriptors without supervision with application to matching and i…
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-Phase Synergy Network with Dual Priors for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Retrieval
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications (Southeast University), Ministry of Education, China（教育部新一代人工智能技术及其跨学科应用重点实验室（东南大学））
Megvii Technology（旷视科技）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Despite significant progress of applying deep learning methods to the field of content-based image retrieval, there has not been a software library that covers these methods in a unified manner. In order to fill this gap, we introduce PyRetri, an open source library for deep learning based unsupervised image retrieval. The library encapsulates the retrieval process in several stages and provides functionality that covers various prominent methods for each stage. The idea underlying its design is to provide a unified platform for deep learning based image retrieval research, with high usability…
Lahore University of Management Sciences（拉合尔管理科学大学）
The advent of deep perceptual networks brought about a paradigm shift in machine vision and image perception. Image apprehension lately carried out by hand-crafted features in the latent space have been replaced by deep features acquired from supervised networks for improved understanding. However, such deep networks require strict supervision with a substantial amount of the labeled data for authentic training process. These methods perform poorly in domains lacking labeled data especially in case of remote sensing image retrieval. Resolving this, we propose an unsupervised encoder-decoder fe…
In recent years, deep hashing methods have been proved to be efficient since it employs convolutional neural network to learn features and hashing codes simultaneously. However, these methods are mostly supervised. In real-world application, it is a time-consuming and overloaded task for annotating a large number of images. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised deep hashing method for large-scale image retrieval. Our method, namely unsupervised semantic deep hashing (\textbf{USDH}), uses semantic information preserved in the CNN feature layer to guide the training of network. We enfor…
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）
Deep hashing has shown promising performance in large-scale image retrieval. However, latent codes extracted by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) will inevitably lose semantic information during the binarization process, which damages the retrieval accuracy and makes it challenging. Although many existing approaches perform regularization to alleviate quantization errors, we figure out an incompatible conflict between metric learning and quantization learning. The metric loss penalizes the inter-class distances to push different classes unconstrained far away. Worse still, it tends to map the latent…
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；Huawei Inc.（华为公司）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Person re-identification (re-ID) is an important topic in computer vision. This paper studies the unsupervised setting of re-ID, which does not require any labeled information and thus is freely deployed to new scenarios. There are very few studies under this setting, and one of the best approach till now used iterative clustering and classification, so that unlabeled images are clustered into pseudo classes for a classifier to get trained, and the updated features are used for clustering and so on. This approach suffers two problems, namely, the difficulty of determining the number of cluster…
The growing amount of data available in modern-day datasets makes the need to efficiently search and retrieve information. To make large-scale search feasible, Distance Estimation and Subset Indexing are the main approaches. Although binary coding has been popular for implementing both techniques, n-ary coding (known as Product Quantization) is also very effective for Distance Estimation. However, their relative performance has not been studied for Subset Indexing. We investigate whether binary or n-ary coding works better under different retrieval strategies. This leads to the design of a new…
Inria Rennes VRG, FEE, CTU in Prague（法国国家信息与自动化研究所雷恩分所VRG、费尔科学院（FEE）、捷克技术大学布拉格分校（CTU in Prague））；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CTU in Prague（捷克技术大学布拉格分校）
Severe background clutter is challenging in many computer vision tasks, including large-scale image retrieval. Global descriptors, that are popular due to their memory and search efficiency, are especially prone to corruption by such a clutter. Eliminating the impact of the clutter on the image descriptor increases the chance of retrieving relevant images and prevents topic drift due to actually retrieving the clutter in the case of query expansion. In this work, we propose a novel salient region detection method. It captures, in an unsupervised manner, patterns that are both discriminative an…
Weakly Supervised Deep Hyperspherical Quantization for Image Retrieval
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Unsupervised binary representation allows fast data retrieval without any annotations, enabling practical application like fast person re-identification and multimedia retrieval. It is argued that conflicts in binary space are one of the major barriers to high-performance unsupervised hashing as current methods failed to capture the precise code conflicts in the full domain. A novel relaxation method called Shuffle and Learn is proposed to tackle code conflicts in the unsupervised hash. Approximated derivatives for joint probability and the gradients for the binary layer are introduced to brid…
Institute for Infocomm Research（资讯通信研究院）；Université Pierre et Marie Curie（皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学）；CentraleSupélec（巴黎中央理工-高等电力学院）
A typical image retrieval pipeline starts with the comparison of global descriptors from a large database to find a short list of candidate matches. A good image descriptor is key to the retrieval pipeline and should reconcile two contradictory requirements: providing recall rates as high as possible and being as compact as possible for fast matching. Following the recent successes of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) for large scale image classification, descriptors extracted from DCNNs are increasingly used in place of the traditional hand crafted descriptors such as Fisher Vectors (…
Central South University（中南大学）；Network Resources Management and Trust Evaluation Key Laboratory of Hunan Province（湖南省网络资源管理与可信评估重点实验室）；School of Computer Science（计算机学院）
Due to its fast retrieval and storage efficiency capabilities, hashing has been widely used in nearest neighbor retrieval tasks. By using deep learning based techniques, hashing can outperform non-learning based hashing technique in many applications. However, we argue that the current deep learning based hashing methods ignore some critical problems (e.g., the learned hash codes are not discriminative due to the hashing methods being unable to discover rich semantic information and the training strategy having difficulty optimizing the discrete binary codes). In this paper, we propose a novel…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）
We propose an unsupervised hashing method which aims to produce binary codes that preserve the ranking induced by a real-valued representation. Such compact hash codes enable the complete elimination of real-valued feature storage and allow for significant reduction of the computation complexity and storage cost of large-scale image retrieval applications. Specifically, we learn a neural network-based model, which transforms the input representation into a binary representation. We formalize the training objective of the network in an intuitive and effective way, considering each training samp…
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing（上海智能信息处理重点实验室）
Due to the subjective nature of social tagging, measuring the relevance of social tags with respect to the visual content is crucial for retrieving the increasing amounts of social-networked images. Witnessing the limit of a single measurement of tag relevance, we introduce in this paper tag relevance fusion as an extension to methods for tag relevance estimation. We present a systematic study, covering tag relevance fusion in early and late stages, and in supervised and unsupervised settings. Experiments on a large present-day benchmark set show that tag relevance fusion leads to better image…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；NAVER Vision（NAVER 视觉）
In hash-based image retrieval systems, degraded or transformed inputs usually generate different codes from the original, deteriorating the retrieval accuracy. To mitigate this issue, data augmentation can be applied during training. However, even if augmented samples of an image are similar in real feature space, the quantization can scatter them far away in Hamming space. This results in representation discrepancies that can impede training and degrade performance. In this work, we propose a novel self-distilled hashing scheme to minimize the discrepancy while exploiting the potential of aug…
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
An effective unsupervised hashing algorithm leads to compact binary codes preserving the neighborhood structure of data as much as possible. One of the most established schemes for unsupervised hashing is to reduce the dimensionality of data and then find a rigid (neighbourhood-preserving) transformation that reduces the quantization error. Although employing rigid transformations is effective, we may not reduce quantization loss to the ultimate limits. As well, reducing dimensionality and quantization loss in two separate steps seems to be sub-optimal. Motivated by these shortcomings, we prop…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Tencent America（腾讯美国）；Tencent Media Lab（腾讯媒体实验室）
An unsupervised point cloud object retrieval and pose estimation method, called PCRP, is proposed in this work. It is assumed that there exists a gallery point cloud set that contains point cloud objects with given pose orientation information. PCRP attempts to register the unknown point cloud object with those in the gallery set so as to achieve content-based object retrieval and pose estimation jointly, where the point cloud registration task is built upon an enhanced version of the unsupervised R-PointHop method. Experiments on the ModelNet40 dataset demonstrate the superior performance of …
Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学协同媒体创新中心）
With the explosive growth of image databases, deep hashing, which learns compact binary descriptors for images, has become critical for fast image retrieval. Many existing deep hashing methods leverage quantization loss, defined as distance between the features before and after quantization, to reduce the error from binarizing features. While minimizing the quantization loss guarantees that quantization has minimal effect on retrieval accuracy, it unfortunately significantly reduces the expressiveness of features even before the quantization. In this paper, we show that the above definition of…
Studies show that Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based image classification models are vulnerable to maliciously constructed adversarial examples. However, little effort has been made to investigate how DNN-based image retrieval models are affected by such attacks. In this paper, we introduce Unsupervised Adversarial Attacks with Generative Adversarial Networks (UAA-GAN) to attack deep feature-based image retrieval systems. UAA-GAN is an unsupervised learning model that requires only a small amount of unlabeled data for training. Once trained, it produces query-specific perturbations for query imag…
Yandex（扬达克斯）；Lomonosov Moscow State University（莫斯科国立罗蒙诺索夫大学）
We tackle the problem of unsupervised visual descriptors compression, which is a key ingredient of large-scale image retrieval systems. While the deep learning machinery has benefited literally all computer vision pipelines, the existing state-of-the-art compression methods employ shallow architectures, and we aim to close this gap by our paper. In more detail, we introduce a DNN architecture for the unsupervised compressed-domain retrieval, based on multi-codebook quantization. The proposed architecture is designed to incorporate both fast data encoding and efficient distances computation via…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Deep hashing establishes efficient and effective image retrieval by end-to-end learning of deep representations and hash codes from similarity data. We present a compact coding solution, focusing on deep learning to quantization approach that has shown superior performance over hashing solutions for similarity retrieval. We propose Deep Triplet Quantization (DTQ), a novel approach to learning deep quantization models from the similarity triplets. To enable more effective triplet training, we design a new triplet selection approach, Group Hard, that randomly selects hard triplets in each image …
The vast increase in amount and complexity of digital content led to a wide interest in ad-hoc retrieval systems in recent years. Complementary, the existence of heterogeneous data sources and retrieval models stimulated the proliferation of increasingly ingenious and effective rank aggregation functions. Although recently proposed rank aggregation functions are promising with respect to effectiveness, existing proposals in the area usually overlook efficiency aspects. We propose an innovative rank aggregation function that is unsupervised, intrinsically multimodal, and targeted for fast retri…
Beyond Single Images: Retrieval Self-Augmented Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection
College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University, China（南开大学人工智能学院）；Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong（香港理工大学计算机系）；School of Computer and Information, Anhui Normal University, China（安徽师范大学计算机与信息学院）
Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Product Quantization, a dictionary based hashing method, is one of the leading unsupervised hashing techniques. While it ignores the labels, it harnesses the features to construct look up tables that can approximate the feature space. In recent years, several works have achieved state of the art results on hashing benchmarks by learning binary representations in a supervised manner. This work presents Deep Product Quantization (DPQ), a technique that leads to more accurate retrieval and classification than the latest state of the art methods, while having similar computational complexity and m…
Cross-modal retrieval aims to search for data with similar semantic meanings across different content modalities. However, cross-modal retrieval requires huge amounts of storage and retrieval time since it needs to process data in multiple modalities. Existing works focused on learning single-source compact features such as binary hash codes that preserve similarities between different modalities. In this work, we propose a jointly learned deep hashing and quantization network (HQ) for cross-modal retrieval. We simultaneously learn binary hash codes and quantization codes to preserve semantic …
