Stochastic Attraction-Repulsion Embedding for Large Scale Image Localization

This paper tackles the problem of large-scale image-based localization (IBL) where the spatial location of a query image is determined by finding out the most similar reference images in a large database. For solving this problem, a critical task is to learn discriminative image representation that captures informative information relevant for localization. We propose a novel representation learning method having higher location-discriminating power. It provides the following contributions: 1) we represent a place (location) as a set of exemplar images depicting the same landmarks and aim to maximize similarities among intra-place images while minimizing similarities among inter-place images; 2) we model a similarity measure as a probability distribution on L_2-metric distances between intra-place and inter-place image representations; 3) we propose a new Stochastic Attraction and Repulsion Embedding (SARE) loss function minimizing the KL divergence between the learned and the actual probability distributions; 4) we give theoretical comparisons between SARE, triplet ranking and contrastive losses. It provides insights into why SARE is better by analyzing gradients. Our SARE loss is easy to implement and pluggable to any CNN. Experiments show that our proposed method improves the localization performance on standard benchmarks by a large margin. Demonstrating the broad applicability of our method, we obtained the third place out of 209 teams in the 2018 Google Landmark Retrieval Challenge. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/Liumouliu/deepIBL.Comment: ICC

Hotels-50K: A Global Hotel Recognition Dataset

Recognizing a hotel from an image of a hotel room is important for human trafficking investigations. Images directly link victims to places and can help verify where victims have been trafficked, and where their traffickers might move them or others in the future. Recognizing the hotel from images is challenging because of low image quality, uncommon camera perspectives, large occlusions (often the victim), and the similarity of objects (e.g., furniture, art, bedding) across different hotel rooms. To support efforts towards this hotel recognition task, we have curated a dataset of over 1 million annotated hotel room images from 50,000 hotels. These images include professionally captured photographs from travel websites and crowd-sourced images from a mobile application, which are more similar to the types of images analyzed in real-world investigations. We present a baseline approach based on a standard network architecture and a collection of data-augmentation approaches tuned to this problem domain

Towards Accurate Camera Geopositioning by Image Matching

In this work, we present a camera geopositioning system based on matching a query image against a database with panoramic images. For matching, our system uses memory vectors aggregated from global image descriptors based on convolutional features to facilitate fast searching in the database. To speed up searching, a clustering algorithm is used to balance geographical positioning and computation time. We refine the obtained position from the query image using a new outlier removal algorithm. The matching of the query image is obtained with a recall@5 larger than 90% for panorama-to-panorama matching. We cluster available panoramas from geographically adjacent locations into a single compact representation and observe computational gains of approximately 50% at the cost of only a small (approximately 3%) recall loss. Finally, we present a coordinate estimation algorithm that reduces the median geopositioning error by up to 20%

Aggregated Deep Local Features for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval

Remote Sensing Image Retrieval remains a challenging topic due to the special nature of Remote Sensing Imagery. Such images contain various different semantic objects, which clearly complicates the retrieval task. In this paper, we present an image retrieval pipeline that uses attentive, local convolutional features and aggregates them using the Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) to produce a global descriptor. We study various system parameters such as the multiplicative and additive attention mechanisms and descriptor dimensionality. We propose a query expansion method that requires no external inputs. Experiments demonstrate that even without training, the local convolutional features and global representation outperform other systems. After system tuning, we can achieve state-of-the-art or competitive results. Furthermore, we observe that our query expansion method increases overall system performance by about 3%, using only the top-three retrieved images. Finally, we show how dimensionality reduction produces compact descriptors with increased retrieval performance and fast retrieval computation times, e.g. 50% faster than the current systems.Comment: Published in Remote Sensing. The first two authors have equal contributio

Intelligent Data Analytics using Deep Learning for Data Science

Nowadays, data science stimulates the interest of academics and practitioners because it can assist in the extraction of significant insights from massive amounts of data. From the years 2018 through 2025, the Global Datasphere is expected to rise from 33 Zettabytes to 175 Zettabytes, according to the International Data Corporation. This dissertation proposes an intelligent data analytics framework that uses deep learning to tackle several difficulties when implementing a data science application. These difficulties include dealing with high inter-class similarity, the availability and quality of hand-labeled data, and designing a feasible approach for modeling significant correlations in features gathered from various data sources. The proposed intelligent data analytics framework employs a novel strategy for improving data representation learning by incorporating supplemental data from various sources and structures. First, the research presents a multi-source fusion approach that utilizes confident learning techniques to improve the data quality from many noisy sources. Meta-learning methods based on advanced techniques such as the mixture of experts and differential evolution combine the predictive capacity of individual learners with a gating mechanism, ensuring that only the most trustworthy features or predictions are integrated to train the model. Then, a Multi-Level Convolutional Fusion is presented to train a model on the correspondence between local-global deep feature interactions to identify easily confused samples of different classes. The convolutional fusion is further enhanced with the power of Graph Transformers, aggregating the relevant neighboring features in graph-based input data structures and achieving state-of-the-art performance on a large-scale building damage dataset. Finally, weakly-supervised strategies, noise regularization, and label propagation are proposed to train a model on sparse input labeled data, ensuring the model\u27s robustness to errors and supporting the automatic expansion of the training set. The suggested approaches outperformed competing strategies in effectively training a model on a large-scale dataset of 500k photos, with just about 7% of the images annotated by a human. The proposed framework\u27s capabilities have benefited various data science applications, including fluid dynamics, geometric morphometrics, building damage classification from satellite pictures, disaster scene description, and storm-surge visualization