Towards Universal Image Embeddings: A Large-Scale Dataset and Challenge for Generic Image Representations

Fine-grained and instance-level recognition methods are commonly trained and evaluated on specific domains, in a model per domain scenario. Such an approach, however, is impractical in real large-scale applications. In this work, we address the problem of universal image embedding, where a single universal model is trained and used in multiple domains. First, we leverage existing domain-specific datasets to carefully construct a new large-scale public benchmark for the evaluation of universal image embeddings, with 241k query images, 1.4M index images and 2.8M training images across 8 different domains and 349k classes. We define suitable metrics, training and evaluation protocols to foster future research in this area. Second, we provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation on the new dataset, demonstrating that existing approaches and simplistic extensions lead to worse performance than an assembly of models trained for each domain separately. Finally, we conducted a public research competition on this topic, leveraging industrial datasets, which attracted the participation of more than 1k teams worldwide. This exercise generated many interesting research ideas and findings which we present in detail. Project webpage: https://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/univ_emb/

The Met Dataset: Instance-level Recognition for Artworks

This work introduces a dataset for large-scale instance-level recognition in the domain of artworks. The proposed benchmark exhibits a number of different challenges such as large inter-class similarity, long tail distribution, and many classes. We rely on the open access collection of The Met museum to form a large training set of about 224k classes, where each class corresponds to a museum exhibit with photos taken under studio conditions. Testing is primarily performed on photos taken by museum guests depicting exhibits, which introduces a distribution shift between training and testing. Testing is additionally performed on a set of images not related to Met exhibits making the task resemble an out-of-distribution detection problem. The proposed benchmark follows the paradigm of other recent datasets for instance-level recognition on different domains to encourage research on domain independent approaches. A number of suitable approaches are evaluated to offer a testbed for future comparisons. Self-supervised and supervised contrastive learning are effectively combined to train the backbone which is used for non-parametric classification that is shown as a promising direction. Dataset webpage: http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/met/