LiveSketch: Query Perturbations for Guided Sketch-based Visual Search

LiveSketch is a novel algorithm for searching large image collections using hand-sketched queries. LiveSketch tackles the inherent ambiguity of sketch search by creating visual suggestions that augment the query as it is drawn, making query specification an iterative rather than one-shot process that helps disambiguate users' search intent. Our technical contributions are: a triplet convnet architecture that incorporates an RNN based variational autoencoder to search for images using vector (stroke-based) queries; real-time clustering to identify likely search intents (and so, targets within the search embedding); and the use of backpropagation from those targets to perturb the input stroke sequence, so suggesting alterations to the query in order to guide the search. We show improvements in accuracy and time-to-task over contemporary baselines using a 67M image corpus.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 201

AMC: Attention guided Multi-modal Correlation Learning for Image Search

Given a user's query, traditional image search systems rank images according to its relevance to a single modality (e.g., image content or surrounding text). Nowadays, an increasing number of images on the Internet are available with associated meta data in rich modalities (e.g., titles, keywords, tags, etc.), which can be exploited for better similarity measure with queries. In this paper, we leverage visual and textual modalities for image search by learning their correlation with input query. According to the intent of query, attention mechanism can be introduced to adaptively balance the importance of different modalities. We propose a novel Attention guided Multi-modal Correlation (AMC) learning method which consists of a jointly learned hierarchy of intra and inter-attention networks. Conditioned on query's intent, intra-attention networks (i.e., visual intra-attention network and language intra-attention network) attend on informative parts within each modality; a multi-modal inter-attention network promotes the importance of the most query-relevant modalities. In experiments, we evaluate AMC models on the search logs from two real world image search engines and show a significant boost on the ranking of user-clicked images in search results. Additionally, we extend AMC models to caption ranking task on COCO dataset and achieve competitive results compared with recent state-of-the-arts.Comment: CVPR 201

Pose-Guided Multi-Granularity Attention Network for Text-Based Person Search

Text-based person search aims to retrieve the corresponding person images in an image database by virtue of a describing sentence about the person, which poses great potential for various applications such as video surveillance. Extracting visual contents corresponding to the human description is the key to this cross-modal matching problem. Moreover, correlated images and descriptions involve different granularities of semantic relevance, which is usually ignored in previous methods. To exploit the multilevel corresponding visual contents, we propose a pose-guided multi-granularity attention network (PMA). Firstly, we propose a coarse alignment network (CA) to select the related image regions to the global description by a similarity-based attention. To further capture the phrase-related visual body part, a fine-grained alignment network (FA) is proposed, which employs pose information to learn latent semantic alignment between visual body part and textual noun phrase. To verify the effectiveness of our model, we perform extensive experiments on the CUHK Person Description Dataset (CUHK-PEDES) which is currently the only available dataset for text-based person search. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 15 \% in terms of the top-1 metric.Comment: published in AAAI2020(oral