Instance Image Retrieval by Learning Purely From Within the Dataset

Quality feature representation is key to instance image retrieval. To attain it, existing methods usually resort to a deep model pre-trained on benchmark datasets or even fine-tune the model with a task-dependent labelled auxiliary dataset. Although achieving promising results, this approach is restricted by two issues: 1) the domain gap between benchmark datasets and the dataset of a given retrieval task; 2) the required auxiliary dataset cannot be readily obtained. In light of this situation, this work looks into a different approach which has not been well investigated for instance image retrieval previously: {can we learn feature representation \textit{specific to} a given retrieval task in order to achieve excellent retrieval?} Our finding is encouraging. By adding an object proposal generator to generate image regions for self-supervised learning, the investigated approach can successfully learn feature representation specific to a given dataset for retrieval. This representation can be made even more effective by boosting it with image similarity information mined from the dataset. As experimentally validated, such a simple ``self-supervised learning + self-boosting'' approach can well compete with the relevant state-of-the-art retrieval methods. Ablation study is conducted to show the appealing properties of this approach and its limitation on generalisation across datasets.