A Multimodal Approach for Cross-Domain Image Retrieval

Image generators are gaining vast amount of popularity and have rapidly changed how digital content is created. With the latest AI technology, millions of high quality images are being generated by the public, which are constantly motivating the research community to push the limits of generative models to create more complex and realistic images. This paper focuses on Cross-Domain Image Retrieval (CDIR) which can be used as an additional tool to inspect collections of generated images by determining the level of similarity between images in a dataset. An ideal retrieval system would be able to generalize to unseen complex images from multiple domains (e.g., photos, drawings and paintings). To address this goal, we propose a novel caption-matching approach that leverages multimodal language-vision architectures pre-trained on large datasets. The method is tested on DomainNet and Office-Home datasets and consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance over the latest approaches in the literature for cross-domain image retrieval. In order to verify the effectiveness with AI-generated images, the method was also put to test with a database composed by samples collected from Midjourney, which is a widely used generative platform for content creation.