Deep Shape Matching

We cast shape matching as metric learning with convolutional networks. We break the end-to-end process of image representation into two parts. Firstly, well established efficient methods are chosen to turn the images into edge maps. Secondly, the network is trained with edge maps of landmark images, which are automatically obtained by a structure-from-motion pipeline. The learned representation is evaluated on a range of different tasks, providing improvements on challenging cases of domain generalization, generic sketch-based image retrieval or its fine-grained counterpart. In contrast to other methods that learn a different model per task, object category, or domain, we use the same network throughout all our experiments, achieving state-of-the-art results in multiple benchmarks.

Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation

Image descriptors based on activations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become dominant in image retrieval due to their discriminative power, compactness of representation, and search efficiency. Training of CNNs, either from scratch or fine-tuning, requires a large amount of annotated data, where a high quality of annotation is often crucial. In this work, we propose to fine-tune CNNs for image retrieval on a large collection of unordered images in a fully automated manner. Reconstructed 3D models obtained by the state-of-the-art retrieval and structure-from-motion methods guide the selection of the training data. We show that both hard-positive and hard-negative examples, selected by exploiting the geometry and the camera positions available from the 3D models, enhance the performance of particular-object retrieval. CNN descriptor whitening discriminatively learned from the same training data outperforms commonly used PCA whitening. We propose a novel trainable Generalized-Mean (GeM) pooling layer that generalizes max and average pooling and show that it boosts retrieval performance. Applying the proposed method to the VGG network achieves state-of-the-art performance on the standard benchmarks: Oxford Buildings, Paris, and Holidays datasets.

Revisiting Oxford and Paris: Large-Scale Image Retrieval Benchmarking

In this paper we address issues with image retrieval benchmarking on standard and popular Oxford 5k and Paris 6k datasets. In particular, annotation errors, the size of the dataset, and the level of challenge are addressed: new annotation for both datasets is created with an extra attention to the reliability of the ground truth. Three new protocols of varying difficulty are introduced. The protocols allow fair comparison between different methods, including those using a dataset pre-processing stage. For each dataset, 15 new challenging queries are introduced. Finally, a new set of 1M hard, semi-automatically cleaned distractors is selected. An extensive comparison of the state-of-the-art methods is performed on the new benchmark. Different types of methods are evaluated, ranging from local-feature-based to modern CNN based methods. The best results are achieved by taking the best of the two worlds. Most importantly, image retrieval appears far from being solved.

CNN Image Retrieval Learns from BoW: Unsupervised Fine-Tuning with Hard Examples

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 positive and hard negative examples enhance the final performance in particular object retrieval with compact codes.