Team JL Solution to Google Landmark Recognition 2019

In this paper, we describe our solution to the Google Landmark Recognition 2019 Challenge held on Kaggle. Due to the large number of classes, noisy data, imbalanced class sizes, and the presence of a significant amount of distractors in the test set, our method is based mainly on retrieval techniques with both global and local CNN approaches. Our full pipeline, after ensembling the models and applying several steps of re-ranking strategies, scores 0.37606 GAP on the private leaderboard which won the 1st place in the competition.

Attention-aware Generalized Mean Pooling for Image Retrieval

It has been shown that image descriptors extracted by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve remarkable results for retrieval problems. In this paper, we apply attention mechanism to CNN, which aims at enhancing more relevant features that correspond to important keypoints in the input image. The generated attention-aware features are then aggregated by the previous state-of-the-art generalized mean (GeM) pooling followed by normalization to produce a compact global descriptor, which can be efficiently compared to other image descriptors by the dot product. An extensive comparison of our proposed approach with state-of-the-art methods is performed on the new challenging ROxford5k and RParis6k retrieval benchmarks. Results indicate significant improvement over previous work. In particular, our attention-aware GeM (AGeM) descriptor outperforms state-of-the-art method on ROxford5k under the `Hard' evaluation protocal.