While methods based on Vision Transformers (ViT) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many domains, they have not yet been applied successfully in the domain of writer retrieval. The field is dominated by methods using handcrafted features or features extracted from Convolutional Neural Networks. In this work, we bridge this gap and present a novel method that extracts features from a ViT and aggregates them using VLAD encoding. The model is trained in a self-supervised fashion without any need for labels. We show that extracting local foreground features is superior to using the ViT's class token in the context of writer retrieval. We evaluate our method on two historical document collections. We set a new state-at-of-art performance on the Historical-WI dataset (83.1\% mAP), and the HisIR19 dataset (95.0\% mAP). Additionally, we demonstrate that our ViT feature extractor can be directly applied to modern datasets such as the CVL database (98.6\% mAP) without any fine-tuning.
The analysis of digitized historical manuscripts is typically addressed by paleographic experts. Writer identification refers to the classification of known writers while writer retrieval seeks to find the writer by means of image similarity in a dataset of images. While automatic writer identification/retrieval methods already provide promising results for many historical document types, papyri data is very challenging due to the fiber structures and severe artifacts. Thus, an important step for an improved writer identification is the preprocessing and feature sampling process. We investigat…
FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）；University of West Bohemia（西波希米亚大学）；Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden（萨克森州立图书馆-德累斯顿国家与大学图书馆）
Automatic writer identification is a common problem in document analysis. State-of-the-art methods typically focus on the feature extraction step with traditional or deep-learning-based techniques. In retrieval problems, re-ranking is a commonly used technique to improve the results. Re-ranking refines an initial ranking result by using the knowledge contained in the ranked result, e. g., by exploiting nearest neighbor relations. To the best of our knowledge, re-ranking has not been used for writer identification/retrieval. A possible reason might be that publicly available benchmark datasets …
BullingerDB: A Dataset for Handwritten Text Recognition and Writer Retrieval
AIBEX Group, University of Fribourg, Switzerland（AIBEX集团，弗里堡大学，瑞士）；iCoSys Institute, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland（iCoSys研究所，西方瑞士应用科学与艺术大学）；Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, Switzerland（计算语言学系，苏黎世大学，瑞士）
This paper addresses writer identification and writer retrieval which is considered as a challenging problem in the document analysis and recognition field. In this work, a novel pipeline is proposed for the problem at hand by employing a unified neural network architecture consisting of the ResNet-20 as a feature extractor and an integrated NetVLAD layer, inspired by the vector of locally aggregated descriptors (VLAD), in the head of the latter part. Having defined this architecture, the triplet semi-hard loss function is used to directly learn an embedding for individual input image patches.…
Towards the Influence of Text Quantity on Writer Retrieval
iCoSys Institute, University of Applied Sciences（iCoSys研究所，应用科学与艺术大学）；Arts Western Switzerland Computer Vision Lab, TU Wien, Austria（西瑞士艺术计算机视觉实验室，维也纳技术大学，奥地利）
Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）；Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院哈拉格布尔分校）；Jadavpur University（贾达普大学）
Writer independent offline signature verification is one of the most challenging tasks in pattern recognition as there is often a scarcity of training data. To handle such data scarcity problem, in this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) framework for writer independent offline signature verification. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to utilize self-supervised setting for the signature verification task. The objective of self-supervised representation learning from the signature images is achieved by minimizing the cross-covariance between two random variables …
Decorrelation-based Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning for Writer Identification
Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute（罗摩克里希纳使命维韦卡南达教育与研究院）；Indian Institute of Information Technology, Guwahati（古瓦哈蒂印度信息技术学院）；Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata（加尔各答印度统计研究所）；Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（克勒格布尔印度理工学院）
Jadavpur University（贾达布尔大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）
Offline Signature Verification (OSV) is a fundamental biometric task across various forensic, commercial and legal applications. The underlying task at hand is to carefully model fine-grained features of the signatures to distinguish between genuine and forged ones, which differ only in minute deformities. This makes OSV more challenging compared to other verification problems. In this work, we propose a two-stage deep learning framework that leverages self-supervised representation learning as well as metric learning for writer-independent OSV. First, we train an image reconstruction network …
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）；Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes（文本研究与历史研究所）；Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique（法国国家科学研究中心）
This competition investigates the performance of large-scale retrieval of historical document images based on writing style. Based on large image data sets provided by cultural heritage institutions and digital libraries, providing a total of 20 000 document images representing about 10 000 writers, divided in three types: writers of (i) manuscript books, (ii) letters, (iii) charters and legal documents. We focus on the task of automatic image retrieval to simulate common scenarios of humanities research, such as writer retrieval. The most teams submitted traditional methods not using deep lea…
The encoding of local features is an essential part for writer identification and writer retrieval. While CNN activations have already been used as local features in related works, the encoding of these features has attracted little attention so far. In this work, we compare the established VLAD encoding with triangulation embedding. We further investigate generalized max pooling as an alternative to sum pooling and the impact of decorrelation and Exemplar SVMs. With these techniques, we set new standards on two publicly available datasets (ICDAR13, KHATT).
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）；Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UPR841)（文本研究与历史研究所（法国国家科学研究中心-UPR841））
This competition succeeds upon a line of competitions for writer and style analysis of historical document images. In particular, we investigate the performance of large-scale retrieval of historical document fragments in terms of style and writer identification. The analysis of historic fragments is a difficult challenge commonly solved by trained humanists. In comparison to previous competitions, we make the results more meaningful by addressing the issue of sample granularity and moving from writer to page fragment retrieval. The two approaches, style and author identification, provide info…
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…
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）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）
Video moment retrieval aims to search the moment most relevant to a given language query. However, most existing methods in this community often require temporal boundary annotations which are expensive and time-consuming to label. Hence weakly supervised methods have been put forward recently by only using coarse video-level label. Despite effectiveness, these methods usually process moment candidates independently, while ignoring a critical issue that the natural temporal dependencies between candidates in different temporal scales. To cope with this issue, we propose a Multi-scale 2D Repres…
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…
School of Information and Communication Engineering（信息与通信工程学院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Recently, deep supervised hashing methods have become popular for large-scale image retrieval task. To preserve the semantic similarity notion between examples, they typically utilize the pairwise supervision or the triplet supervised information for hash learning. However, these methods usually ignore the semantic class information which can help the improvement of the semantic discriminative ability of hash codes. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchy neighborhood discriminative hashing method. Specifically, we construct a bipartite graph to build coarse semantic neighbourhood relation…
Video moment retrieval is to search the moment that is most relevant to the given natural language query. Existing methods are mostly trained in a fully-supervised setting, which requires the full annotations of temporal boundary for each query. However, manually labeling the annotations is actually time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly-supervised moment retrieval framework requiring only coarse video-level annotations for training. Specifically, we devise a proposal generation module that aggregates the context information to generate and score all candidate p…
Jiangnan University（江南大学）；University of Surry（萨里大学）
Recently, hashing techniques have gained importance in large-scale retrieval tasks because of their retrieval speed. Most of the existing cross-view frameworks assume that data are well paired. However, the fully-paired multiview situation is not universal in real applications. The aim of the method proposed in this paper is to learn the hashing function for semi-paired cross-view retrieval tasks. To utilize the label information of partial data, we propose a semi-supervised hashing learning framework which jointly performs feature extraction and classifier learning. The experimental results o…
CAD model retrieval to real-world scene observations has shown strong promise as a basis for 3D perception of objects and a clean, lightweight mesh-based scene representation; however, current approaches to retrieve CAD models to a query scan rely on expensive manual annotations of 1:1 associations of CAD-scan objects, which typically contain strong lower-level geometric differences. We thus propose a new weakly-supervised approach to retrieve semantically and structurally similar CAD models to a query 3D scanned scene without requiring any CAD-scan associations, and only object detection info…
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）
Several deep supervised hashing techniques have been proposed to allow for efficiently querying large image databases. However, deep supervised image hashing techniques are developed, to a great extent, heuristically often leading to suboptimal results. Contrary to this, we propose an efficient deep supervised hashing algorithm that optimizes the learned codes using an information-theoretic measure, the Quadratic Mutual Information (QMI). The proposed method is adapted to the needs of large-scale hashing and information retrieval leading to a novel information-theoretic measure, the Quadratic …
We present our solution to Landmark Image Retrieval Challenge 2019. This challenge was based on the large Google Landmarks Dataset V2[9]. The goal was to retrieve all database images containing the same landmark for every provided query image. Our solution is a combination of global and local models to form an initial KNN graph. We then use a novel extension of the recently proposed graph traversal method EGT [1] referred to as semi-supervised EGT to refine the graph and retrieve better candidates.
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…
Boston University（波士顿大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
The goal of weakly-supervised video moment retrieval is to localize the video segment most relevant to the given natural language query without access to temporal annotations during training. Prior strongly- and weakly-supervised approaches often leverage co-attention mechanisms to learn visual-semantic representations for localization. However, while such approaches tend to focus on identifying relationships between elements of the video and language modalities, there is less emphasis on modeling relational context between video frames given the semantic context of the query. Consequently, th…
Due to abundance of data from multiple modalities, cross-modal retrieval tasks with image-text, audio-image, etc. are gaining increasing importance. Of the different approaches proposed, supervised methods usually give significant improvement over their unsupervised counterparts at the additional cost of labeling or annotation of the training data. Semi-supervised methods are recently becoming popular as they provide an elegant framework to balance the conflicting requirement of labeling cost and accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel deep semi-supervised framework which can seamlessly han…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Thanks to the success of deep learning, cross-modal retrieval has made significant progress recently. However, there still remains a crucial bottleneck: how to bridge the modality gap to further enhance the retrieval accuracy. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised adversarial hashing (\textbf{SSAH}) approach, which lies among the early attempts to incorporate adversarial learning into cross-modal hashing in a self-supervised fashion. The primary contribution of this work is that two adversarial networks are leveraged to maximize the semantic correlation and consistency of the representat…
Content-based video retrieval aims to find videos from a large video database that are similar to or even near-duplicate of a given query video. Video representation and similarity search algorithms are crucial to any video retrieval system. To derive effective video representation, most video retrieval systems require a large amount of manually annotated data for training, making it costly inefficient. In addition, most retrieval systems are based on frame-level features for video similarity searching, making it expensive both storage wise and search wise. We propose a novel video retrieval s…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Zhongshan Hospital of Fudan University（复旦大学附属中山医院）
Colonoscopic video retrieval, which is a critical part of polyp treatment, has great clinical significance for the prevention and treatment of colorectal cancer. However, retrieval models trained on action recognition datasets usually produce unsatisfactory retrieval results on colonoscopic datasets due to the large domain gap between them. To seek a solution to this problem, we construct a large-scale colonoscopic dataset named Colo-Pair for medical practice. Based on this dataset, a simple yet effective training method called Colo-SCRL is proposed for more robust representation learning. It …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Technology, Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
This paper contributes a new large-scale dataset for weakly supervised cross-media retrieval, named Twitter100k. Current datasets, such as Wikipedia, NUS Wide and Flickr30k, have two major limitations. First, these datasets are lacking in content diversity, i.e., only some pre-defined classes are covered. Second, texts in these datasets are written in well-organized language, leading to inconsistency with realistic applications. To overcome these drawbacks, the proposed Twitter100k dataset is characterized by two aspects: 1) it has 100,000 image-text pairs randomly crawled from Twitter and thu…
Nowadays the measure between heterogeneous data is still an open problem for cross-modal retrieval. The core of cross-modal retrieval is how to measure the similarity between different types of data. Many approaches have been developed to solve the problem. As one of the mainstream, approaches based on subspace learning pay attention to learning a common subspace where the similarity among multi-modal data can be measured directly. However, many of the existing approaches only focus on learning a latent subspace. They ignore the full use of discriminative information so that the semantically s…
Cross-modal recipe retrieval has recently gained substantial attention due to the importance of food in people's lives, as well as the availability of vast amounts of digital cooking recipes and food images to train machine learning models. In this work, we revisit existing approaches for cross-modal recipe retrieval and propose a simplified end-to-end model based on well established and high performing encoders for text and images. We introduce a hierarchical recipe Transformer which attentively encodes individual recipe components (titles, ingredients and instructions). Further, we propose a…
The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）；Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）；CVIT, KCIS, IIIT Hyderabad（印度理工学院海得拉巴分校计算机视觉与智能技术中心（CVIT））
Cross-modal retrieval methods have been significantly improved in last years with the use of deep neural networks and large-scale annotated datasets such as ImageNet and Places. However, collecting and annotating such datasets requires a tremendous amount of human effort and, besides, their annotations are usually limited to discrete sets of popular visual classes that may not be representative of the richer semantics found on large-scale cross-modal retrieval datasets. In this paper, we present a self-supervised cross-modal retrieval framework that leverages as training data the correlations …
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…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Guizhou Normal University（贵州师范大学）；Hubei University（湖北大学）
Mapping X-ray images, radiology reports, and other medical data as binary codes in the common space, which can assist clinicians to retrieve pathology-related data from heterogeneous modalities (i.e., hashing-based cross-modal medical data retrieval), provides a new view to promot computeraided diagnosis. Nevertheless, there remains a barrier to boost medical retrieval accuracy: how to reveal the ambiguous semantics of medical data without the distraction of superfluous information. To circumvent this drawback, we propose Deep Supervised Information Bottleneck Hashing (DSIBH), which effectivel…
Differential Privacy offers strong guarantees such as immutable privacy under post processing. Thus it is often looked to as a solution to learning on scattered and isolated data. This work focuses on supervised manifold learning, a paradigm that can generate fine-tuned manifolds for a target use case. Our contributions are two fold. 1) We present a novel differentially private method \textit{PrivateMail} for supervised manifold learning, the first of its kind to our knowledge. 2) We provide a novel private geometric embedding scheme for our experimental use case. We experiment on private "con…
Eurecat, Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚技术中心）；Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）
Self-Supervised learning from multimodal image and text data allows deep neural networks to learn powerful features with no need of human annotated data. Web and Social Media platforms provide a virtually unlimited amount of this multimodal data. In this work we propose to exploit this free available data to learn a multimodal image and text embedding, aiming to leverage the semantic knowledge learnt in the text domain and transfer it to a visual model for semantic image retrieval. We demonstrate that the proposed pipeline can learn from images with associated textwithout supervision and analy…
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Institut National de l’Audiovisuel（法国国家视听研究院）
Supervised representation learning with deep networks tends to overfit the training classes and the generalization to novel classes is a challenging question. It is common to evaluate a learned embedding on held-out images of the same training classes. In real applications however, data comes from new sources and novel classes are likely to arise. We hypothesize that incorporating unlabelled images of novel classes in the training set in a semi-supervised fashion would be beneficial for the efficient retrieval of novel-class images compared to a vanilla supervised representation. To verify thi…
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 thi…
In this paper, we introduce 3D-CSL, a compact pipeline for Near-Duplicate Video Retrieval (NDVR), and explore a novel self-supervised learning strategy for video similarity learning. Most previous methods only extract video spatial features from frames separately and then design kinds of complex mechanisms to learn the temporal correlations among frame features. However, parts of spatiotemporal dependencies have already been lost. To address this, our 3D-CSL extracts global spatiotemporal dependencies in videos end-to-end with a 3D transformer and find a good balance between efficiency and eff…
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…
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）
Large-scale weakly supervised product retrieval is a practically useful yet computationally challenging problem. This paper introduces a novel solution for the eBay Visual Search Challenge (eProduct) held at the Ninth Workshop on Fine-Grained Visual Categorisation workshop (FGVC9) of CVPR 2022. This competition presents two challenges: (a) E-commerce is a drastically fine-grained domain including many products with subtle visual differences; (b) A lacking of target instance-level labels for model training, with only coarse category labels and product titles available. To overcome these obstacl…
We introduce a novel deep neural network architecture that links visual regions to corresponding textual segments including phrases and words. To accomplish this task, our architecture makes use of the rich semantic information available in a joint embedding space of multi-modal data. From this joint embedding space, we extract the associative localization maps that develop naturally, without explicitly providing supervision during training for the localization task. The joint space is learned using a bidirectional ranking objective that is optimized using a $N$-Pair loss formulation. This tra…
Learning Mahanalobis distance metrics in a high- dimensional feature space is very difficult especially when structural sparsity and low rank are enforced to improve com- putational efficiency in testing phase. This paper addresses both aspects by an ensemble metric learning approach that consists of sparse block diagonal metric ensembling and join- t metric learning as two consecutive steps. The former step pursues a highly sparse block diagonal metric by selecting effective feature groups while the latter one further exploits correlations between selected feature groups to obtain an accurate…
Content based image retrieval (CBIR) provides the clinician with visual information that can support, and hopefully improve, his or her decision making process. Given an input query image, a CBIR system provides as its output a set of images, ranked by similarity to the query image. Retrieved images may come with relevant information, such as biopsy-based malignancy labeling, or categorization. Ground truth on similarity between dataset elements (e.g. between nodules) is not readily available, thus greatly challenging machine learning methods. Such annotations are particularly difficult to obt…
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；NEC Laboratories America, Inc.（NEC美国实验室）
Self-supervised video representation learning has been shown to effectively improve downstream tasks such as video retrieval and action recognition. In this paper, we present the Cascade Positive Retrieval (CPR) that successively mines positive examples w.r.t. the query for contrastive learning in a cascade of stages. Specifically, CPR exploits multiple views of a query example in different modalities, where an alternative view may help find another positive example dissimilar in the query view. We explore the effects of possible CPR configurations in ablations including the number of mining s…
