Binary Constrained Deep Hashing Network for Image Retrieval Without Manual Annotation

Learning compact binary codes for image retrieval task using deep neural networks has attracted increasing attention recently. However, training deep hashing networks for the task is challenging due to the binary constraints on the hash codes, the similarity preserving property, and the requirement for a vast amount of labelled images. To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing methods has tackled all of these challenges completely in a unified framework. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning approach for the task, in which the network is trained to produce binary codes directly from image pixels without the need of manual annotation. In particular, to deal with the non-smoothness of binary constraints, we propose a novel pairwise constrained loss function, which simultaneously encodes the distances between pairs of hash codes, and the binary quantization error. In order to train the network with the proposed loss function, we propose an efficient parameter learning algorithm. In addition, to provide similar / dissimilar training images to train the network, we exploit 3D models reconstructed from unlabelled images for automatic generation of enormous training image pairs. The extensive experiments on image retrieval benchmark datasets demonstrate the improvements of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art compact representation methods on the image retrieval problem.Comment: Accepted to WACV 201

Cross-Paced Representation Learning with Partial Curricula for Sketch-based Image Retrieval

In this paper we address the problem of learning robust cross-domain representations for sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR). While most SBIR approaches focus on extracting low- and mid-level descriptors for direct feature matching, recent works have shown the benefit of learning coupled feature representations to describe data from two related sources. However, cross-domain representation learning methods are typically cast into non-convex minimization problems that are difficult to optimize, leading to unsatisfactory performance. Inspired by self-paced learning, a learning methodology designed to overcome convergence issues related to local optima by exploiting the samples in a meaningful order (i.e. easy to hard), we introduce the cross-paced partial curriculum learning (CPPCL) framework. Compared with existing self-paced learning methods which only consider a single modality and cannot deal with prior knowledge, CPPCL is specifically designed to assess the learning pace by jointly handling data from dual sources and modality-specific prior information provided in the form of partial curricula. Additionally, thanks to the learned dictionaries, we demonstrate that the proposed CPPCL embeds robust coupled representations for SBIR. Our approach is extensively evaluated on four publicly available datasets (i.e. CUFS, Flickr15K, QueenMary SBIR and TU-Berlin Extension datasets), showing superior performance over competing SBIR methods

Deep Learning for Free-Hand Sketch: A Survey

Free-hand sketches are highly illustrative, and have been widely used by humans to depict objects or stories from ancient times to the present. The recent prevalence of touchscreen devices has made sketch creation a much easier task than ever and consequently made sketch-oriented applications increasingly popular. The progress of deep learning has immensely benefited free-hand sketch research and applications. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the deep learning techniques oriented at free-hand sketch data, and the applications that they enable. The main contents of this survey include: (i) A discussion of the intrinsic traits and unique challenges of free-hand sketch, to highlight the essential differences between sketch data and other data modalities, e.g., natural photos. (ii) A review of the developments of free-hand sketch research in the deep learning era, by surveying existing datasets, research topics, and the state-of-the-art methods through a detailed taxonomy and experimental evaluation. (iii) Promotion of future work via a discussion of bottlenecks, open problems, and potential research directions for the community.Comment: This paper is accepted by IEEE TPAM

Contrastive Masked Autoencoders for Self-Supervised Video Hashing

Self-Supervised Video Hashing (SSVH) models learn to generate short binary representations for videos without ground-truth supervision, facilitating large-scale video retrieval efficiency and attracting increasing research attention. The success of SSVH lies in the understanding of video content and the ability to capture the semantic relation among unlabeled videos. Typically, state-of-the-art SSVH methods consider these two points in a two-stage training pipeline, where they firstly train an auxiliary network by instance-wise mask-and-predict tasks and secondly train a hashing model to preserve the pseudo-neighborhood structure transferred from the auxiliary network. This consecutive training strategy is inflexible and also unnecessary. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective one-stage SSVH method called ConMH, which incorporates video semantic information and video similarity relationship understanding in a single stage. To capture video semantic information for better hashing learning, we adopt an encoder-decoder structure to reconstruct the video from its temporal-masked frames. Particularly, we find that a higher masking ratio helps video understanding. Besides, we fully exploit the similarity relationship between videos by maximizing agreement between two augmented views of a video, which contributes to more discriminative and robust hash codes. Extensive experiments on three large-scale video datasets (i.e., FCVID, ActivityNet and YFCC) indicate that ConMH achieves state-of-the-art results. Code is available at https://github.com/huangmozhi9527/ConMH.Comment: This work is accepted by the AAAI 2023. 9 pages, 6 figures, 6 table

Faster Person Re-Identification: One-shot-Filter and Coarse-to-Fine Search.

Fast person re-identification (ReID) aims to search person images quickly and accurately. The main idea of recent fast ReID methods is the hashing algorithm, which learns compact binary codes and performs fast Hamming distance and counting sort. However, a very long code is needed for high accuracy (e.g. 2048), which compromises search speed. In this work, we introduce a new solution for fast ReID by formulating a novel Coarse-to-Fine (CtF) hashing code search strategy, which complementarily uses short and long codes, achieving both faster speed and better accuracy. It uses shorter codes to coarsely rank broad matching similarities and longer codes to refine only a few top candidates for more accurate instance ReID. Specifically, we design an All-in-One (AiO) module together with a Distance Threshold Optimization (DTO) algorithm. In AiO, we simultaneously learn and enhance multiple codes of different lengths in a single model. It learns multiple codes in a pyramid structure, and encourage shorter codes to mimic longer codes by self-distillation. DTO solves a complex threshold search problem by a simple optimization process, and the balance between accuracy and speed is easily controlled by a single parameter. It formulates the optimization target as a Fβ score that can be optimised by Gaussian cumulative distribution functions. Besides, we find even short code (e.g. 32) still takes a long time under large-scale gallery due to the O(n) time complexity. To solve the problem, we propose a gallery-size-free latent-attributes-based One-Shot-Filter (OSF) strategy, that is always O(1) time complexity, to quickly filter major easy negative gallery images, Specifically, we design a Latent-Attribute-Learning (LAL) module supervised a Single-Direction-Metric (SDM) Loss. LAL is derived from principal component analysis (PCA) that keeps largest variance using shortest feature vector, meanwhile enabling batch and end-to-end learning. Every logit of a feature vector represents a meaningful attribute. SDM is carefully designed for fine-grained attribute supervision, outperforming common metrics such as Euclidean and Cosine metrics. Experimental results on 2 datasets show that CtF+OSF is not only 2% more accurate but also 5× faster than contemporary hashing ReID methods. Compared with non-hashing ReID methods, CtF is 50× faster with comparable accuracy. OSF further speeds CtF by 2× again and upto 10× in total with almost no accuracy drop

Semi-Supervised Learning for Scalable and Robust Visual Search

Unlike textual document retrieval, searching of visual data is still far from satisfactory. There exist major gaps between the available solutions and practical needs in both accuracy and computational cost. This thesis aims at the development of robust and scalable solutions for visual search and retrieval. Specifically, we investigate two classes of approaches: graph-based semi-supervised learning and hashing techniques. The graph-based approaches are used to improve accuracy, while hashing approaches are used to improve efficiency and cope with large-scale applications. A common theme shared between these two subareas of our work is the focus on semi-supervised learning paradigm, in which a small set of labeled data is complemented with large unlabeled datasets. Graph-based approaches have emerged as methods of choice for general semi-supervised tasks when no parametric information is available about the data distribution. It treats both labeled and unlabeled samples as vertices in a graph and then instantiates pairwise edges between these vertices to capture affinity between the corresponding samples. A quadratic regularization framework has been widely used for label prediction over such graphs. However, most of the existing graph-based semi-supervised learning methods are sensitive to the graph construction process and the initial labels. We propose a new bivariate graph transduction formulation and an efficient solution via an alternating minimization procedure. Based on this bivariate framework, we also develop new methods to filter unreliable and noisy labels. Extensive experiments over diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed methods. However, graph-based approaches suffer from the critical bottleneck in scalability since graph construction requires a quadratic complexity and the inference procedure costs even more. The widely used graph construction method relies on nearest neighbor search, which is prohibitive for large-scale applications. In addition, most large-scale visual search problems involve handling high-dimensional visual descriptors, thereby causing another challenge in excessive storage requirement. To handle the scalability issue of both computation and storage, the second part of the thesis focuses on efficient techniques for conducting approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search, which is key to many machine learning algorithms, including graph-based semi-supervised learning and clustering. Specifically, we propose Semi-Supervised Hashing (SSH) methods that leverage semantic similarity over a small set of labeled data while preventing overfitting. We derive a rigorous formulation in which a supervised term minimizes the empirical errors on the labeled data and an unsupervised term provides effective regularization by maximizing variance and independence of individual bits. Experiments on several large datasets demonstrate the clear performance gain over several state-of-the-art methods without significant increase of the computational cost. The main contributions of the thesis include the following. Bivariate graph transduction: a) a bivariate formulation for graph-based semi-supervised learning with an efficient solution by alternating optimization; b) theoretic analysis from the view of graph cut for the bivariate optimization procedure; c) novel applications of the proposed techniques, such as interactive image retrieval, automatic re-ranking for text based image search, and a brain computer interface (BCI) for image retrieval. Semi-supervised hashing: a) a rigorous semi-supervised paradigm for hash functions learning with a tradeoff between empirical fitness on pair-wise label consistence and an information-theoretic regularizer; b) several efficient solutions for deriving semi-supervised hash functions, including an orthogonal solution using eigen-decomposition, a revised strategy for learning non-orthogonal hash functions, a sequential learning algorithm to derive boosted hash functions, and an extension to unsupervised cases by using pseudo labels. Two parts of the thesis - bivariate graph transduction and semi-supervised hashing - are complimentary and can be combined to achieve significant performance improvement in both speed and accuracy. Hash methods can help build sparse graphs in a linear time fashion and greatly reduce the data size, but they lack sufficient accuracy. Graph-based methods provide unique capabilities to handle non-linear data structures with noisy labels but suffer from high computational complexity. The synergistic combination of the two offers great potential for advancing the state-of-the-art in large-scale visual search and many other applications

다양한 딥 러닝 학습 환경 하의 컨텐츠 기반 이미지 검색

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 공과대학 전기·정보공학부, 2022.2. 조남익.방대한 데이터베이스에서 질의에 대한 관련 이미지를 찾는 콘텐츠 기반 이미지 검색은 컴퓨터 비전 분야의 근본적인 작업 중 하나이다. 특히 빠르고 정확한 검색을 수행하기 위해 해싱 (Hashing) 및 곱 양자화 (Product Quantization, PQ) 로 대표되는 근사최근접 이웃 (Approximate Nearest Neighbor, ANN) 검색 방식이 이미지 검색 커뮤니티에서 주목받고 있다. 신경망 기반 딥 러닝 (CNN-based deep learning) 이 많은 컴퓨터 비전 작업에서 우수한 성능을 보여준 이후로, 해싱 및 곱 양자화 기반 이미지 검색 시스템 모두 개선을 위해 딥 러닝을 채택하고 있다. 본 학위 논문에서는 적절한 검색 시스템을 제안하기 위해 다양한 딥 러닝 학습 환경아래에서 이미지 검색 방법을 제안한다. 구체적으로, 이미지 검색의 목적을 고려하여 의미적으로 유사한 이미지를 검색하는 딥 러닝 해싱 시스템을 개발하기 위한 지도 학습 방법을 제안하고, 의미적, 시각적으로 모두 유사한 이미지를 검색하는 딥 러닝 곱 양자화 기반의 시스템을 구축하기 위한 준지도, 비지도 학습 방법을 제안한다. 또한, 이미지 검색 데이터베이스의 특성을 고려하여, 분류해야할 클래스 (class category) 가 많은 얼굴 이미지 데이터 세트와 하나 이상의 레이블 (label) 이 지정된 일반 이미지 세트를 분리하여 따로 검색 시스템을 구축한다. 먼저 이미지에 부여된 의미론적 레이블을 사용하는 지도 학습을 도입하여 해싱 기반 검색 시스템을 구축한다. 클래스 간 유사성 (다른 사람 사이의 유사한 외모) 과 클래스 내 변화(같은 사람의 다른 포즈, 표정, 조명) 와 같은 얼굴 이미지 구별의 어려움을 해결하기 위해 각 이미지의 클래스 레이블을 사용한다. 얼굴 이미지 검색 품질을 더욱 향상시키기 위해 SGH (Similarity Guided Hashing) 방식을 제안하며, 여기서 다중 데이터 증강 결과를 사용한 자기 유사성 학습이 훈련 중에 사용된다. 그리고 해싱 기반의 일반 이미지 검색 시스템을 구성하기 위해 DHD(Deep Hash Distillation) 방식을 제안한다. DHD에서는 지도 신호를 활용하기 위해 클래스별 대표성을 나타내는 훈련 가능한 해시 프록시 (proxy) 를 도입한다. 또한, 해싱에 적합한 자체 증류 기법을 제안하여 증강 데이터의 잠재력을 일반적인 이미지 검색 성능 향상에 적용한다. 둘째로, 레이블이 지정된 이미지 데이터와 레이블이 지정되지 않은 이미지 데이터를 모두 활용하는 준지도 학습을 조사하여 곱 양자화 기반 검색 시스템을 구축한다. 지도 학습 딥 러닝 기반의 이미지 검색 방법들은 우수한 성능을 보이려면 값비싼 레이블 정보가 충분해야 한다는 단점이 있다. 게다가, 레이블이 지정되지 않은 수많은 이미지 데이터는 훈련에서 제외된다는 한계가 있다. 이 문제를 해결하기 위해 벡터 양자화 기반 반지도 영상 검색 방식인 GPQ (Generalized Product Quantization) 네트워크를 제안한다. 레이블이 지정된 데이터 간의 의미론적 유사성을 유지하는 새로운 메트릭 학습 (Metric learning) 전략과 레이블이 지정되지 않은 데이터의 고유한 잠재력을 최대한 활용하는 엔트로피 정규화 방법을 사용하여 검색 시스템을 개선한다. 이 솔루션은 양자화 네트워크의 일반화 용량을 증가시켜 이전의 한계를 극복할 수 있게한다. 마지막으로, 딥 러닝 모델이 사람의 지도 없이 시각적으로 유사한 이미지 검색을 수행할 수 있도록 하기 위해 비지도 학습 알고리즘을 탐색한다. 비록 레이블 주석을 활용한 심층 지도 기반의 방법들이 기존 방법들에 대비 우수한 검색 성능을 보일지라도, 방대한 양의 훈련 데이터에 대해 정확하게 레이블을 지정하는 것은 힘들고 주석에서 오류가 발생하기 쉽다는 한계가 있다. 이 문제를 해결하기 위해 레이블 없이 자체 지도 방식으로 훈련하는 SPQ (Self-supervised Product Quantization) 네트워크 라는 심층 비지도 이미지 검색 방법을 제안한다. 새롭게 설계된 교차 양자화 대조 학습 방식으로 서로 다르게 변환된 이미지를 비교하여 곱 양자화의 코드워드와 심층 시각적 표현을 동시에 학습한다. 이 방식을 통해 이미지에 내제된 내용을 별도의 사람 지도 없이 네트워크가 스스로 이해하게 되고, 시각적으로 정확한 검색을 수행할 수 있는 설명 기능을 추출할 수 있게 된다. 벤치마크 데이터 세트에 대한 광범위한 이미지 검색 실험을 수행하여 제안된 방법이 다양한 평가 프로토콜에서 뛰어난 결과를 산출함을 확인했다. 지도 학습 기반의 얼굴 영상 검색의 경우 SGH는 저해상도 및 고해상도 얼굴 영상 모두에서 최고의 검색 성능을 달성하였고, DHD는 최고의 검색 정확도로 일반 영상 검색 실험에서 효율성을 입증한다. 준지도 일반 이미지 검색의 경우 GPQ는 레이블이 있는 이미지 데이터와 레이블이 없는 이미지 데이터를 모두 사용하는 프로토콜에 대한 최상의 검색 결과를 보여준다. 마지막으로, 비지도 학습 이미지 검색의 경우 지도 방식으로 미리 학습된 초기 값 없이도 SPQ를 사용하여 최상의 검색 점수를 얻었으며 시각적으로 유사한 이미지가 검색 결과로 성공적으로 검색되는 것을 관찰할 수 있다.Content-based image retrieval, which finds relevant images to a query from a huge database, is one of the fundamental tasks in the field of computer vision. Especially for conducting fast and accurate retrieval, Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search approaches represented by Hashing and Product Quantization (PQ) have been proposed to image retrieval community. Ever since neural network based deep learning has shown excellent performance in many computer vision tasks, both Hashing and product quantization-based image retrieval systems are also adopting deep learning for improvement. In this dissertation, image retrieval methods under various deep learning conditions are investigated to suggest the appropriate retrieval systems. Specifically, by considering the purpose of image retrieval, the supervised learning methods are proposed to develop the deep Hashing systems that retrieve semantically similar images, and the semi-supervised, unsupervised learning methods are proposed to establish the deep product quantization systems that retrieve both semantically and visually similar images. Moreover, by considering the characteristics of image retrieval database, the face image sets with numerous class categories, and the general image sets of one or more labeled images are separated to be explored when building a retrieval system. First, supervised learning with the semantic labels given to images is introduced to build a Hashing-based retrieval system. To address the difficulties of distinguishing face images, such as the inter-class similarities (similar appearance between different persons) and the intra-class variations (same person with different pose, facial expressions, illuminations), the identity label of each image is employed to derive the discriminative binary codes. To further develop the face image retrieval quality, Similarity Guided Hashing (SGH) scheme is proposed, where the self-similarity learning with multiple data augmentation results are employed during training. In terms of Hashing-based general image retrieval systems, Deep Hash Distillation (DHD) scheme is proposed, where the trainable hash proxy that presents class-wise representative is introduced to take advantage of supervised signals. Moreover, self-distillation scheme adapted for Hashing is utilized to improve general image retrieval performance by exploiting the potential of augmented data appropriately. Second, semi-supervised learning that utilizes both labeled and unlabeled image data is investigated to build a PQ-based retrieval system. Even if the supervised deep methods show excellent performance, they do not meet the expectations unless expensive label information is sufficient. Besides, there is a limitation that a tons of unlabeled image data is excluded from training. To resolve this issue, the vector quantization-based semi-supervised image retrieval scheme: Generalized Product Quantization (GPQ) network is proposed. A novel metric learning strategy that preserves semantic similarity between labeled data, and a entropy regularization term that fully exploits inherent potentials of unlabeled data are employed to improve the retrieval system. This solution increases the generalization capacity of the quantization network, which allows to overcome previous limitations. Lastly, to enable the network to perform a visually similar image retrieval on its own without any human supervision, unsupervised learning algorithm is explored. Although, deep supervised Hashing and PQ methods achieve the outstanding retrieval performances compared to the conventional methods by fully exploiting the label annotations, however, it is painstaking to assign labels precisely for a vast amount of training data, and also, the annotation process is error-prone. To tackle these issues, the deep unsupervised image retrieval method dubbed Self-supervised Product Quantization (SPQ) network, which is label-free and trained in a self-supervised manner is proposed. A newly designed Cross Quantized Contrastive learning strategy is applied to jointly learn the PQ codewords and the deep visual representations by comparing individually transformed images (views). This allows to understand the image content and extract descriptive features so that the visually accurate retrieval can be performed. By conducting extensive image retrieval experiments on the benchmark datasets, the proposed methods are confirmed to yield the outstanding results under various evaluation protocols. For supervised face image retrieval, SGH achieves the best retrieval performance for both low and high resolution face image, and DHD also demonstrates its efficiency in general image retrieval experiments with the state-of-the-art retrieval performance. For semi-supervised general image retrieval, GPQ shows the best search results for protocols that use both labeled and unlabeled image data. Finally, for unsupervised general image retrieval, the best retrieval scores are achieved with SPQ even without supervised pre-training, and it can be observed that visually similar images are successfully retrieved as search results.Abstract i Contents iv List of Tables vii List of Figures viii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Contribution 3 1.2 Contents 4 2 Supervised Learning for Deep Hashing: Similarity Guided Hashing for Face Image Retrieval / Deep Hash Distillation for General Image Retrieval 5 2.1 Motivation and Overview for Face Image Retrieval 5 2.1.1 Related Works 9 2.2 Similarity Guided Hashing 10 2.3 Experiments 16 2.3.1 Datasets and Setup 16 2.3.2 Results on Small Face Images 18 2.3.3 Results on Large Face Images 19 2.4 Motivation and Overview for General Image Retrieval 20 2.5 Related Works 22 2.6 Deep Hash Distillation 24 2.6.1 Self-distilled Hashing 24 2.6.2 Teacher loss 27 2.6.3 Training 29 2.6.4 Hamming Distance Analysis 29 2.7 Experiments 32 2.7.1 Setup 32 2.7.2 Implementation Details 32 2.7.3 Results 34 2.7.4 Analysis 37 3 Semi-supervised Learning for Product Quantization: Generalized Product Quantization Network for Semi-supervised Image Retrieval 42 3.1 Motivation and Overview 42 3.1.1 Related Work 45 3.2 Generalized Product Quantization 47 3.2.1 Semi-Supervised Learning 48 3.2.2 Retrieval 52 3.3 Experiments 53 3.3.1 Setup 53 3.3.2 Results and Analysis 55 4 Unsupervised Learning for Product Quantization: Self-supervised Product Quantization for Deep Unsupervised Image Retrieval 58 4.1 Motivation and Overview 58 4.1.1 Related Works 61 4.2 Self-supervised Product Quantization 62 4.2.1 Overall Framework 62 4.2.2 Self-supervised Training 64 4.3 Experiments 67 4.3.1 Datasets 67 4.3.2 Experimental Settings 68 4.3.3 Results 71 4.3.4 Empirical Analysis 71 5 Conclusion 75 Abstract (In Korean) 88박