Recent Advance in Content-based Image Retrieval: A Literature Survey

The explosive increase and ubiquitous accessibility of visual data on the Web have led to the prosperity of research activity in image search or retrieval. With the ignorance of visual content as a ranking clue, methods with text search techniques for visual retrieval may suffer inconsistency between the text words and visual content. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR), which makes use of the representation of visual content to identify relevant images, has attracted sustained attention in recent two decades. Such a problem is challenging due to the intention gap and the semantic gap problems. Numerous techniques have been developed for content-based image retrieval in the last decade. The purpose of this paper is to categorize and evaluate those algorithms proposed during the period of 2003 to 2016. We conclude with several promising directions for future research.Comment: 22 page

Deep Sketch Hashing: Fast Free-hand Sketch-Based Image Retrieval

Free-hand sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) is a specific cross-view retrieval task, in which queries are abstract and ambiguous sketches while the retrieval database is formed with natural images. Work in this area mainly focuses on extracting representative and shared features for sketches and natural images. However, these can neither cope well with the geometric distortion between sketches and images nor be feasible for large-scale SBIR due to the heavy continuous-valued distance computation. In this paper, we speed up SBIR by introducing a novel binary coding method, named \textbf{Deep Sketch Hashing} (DSH), where a semi-heterogeneous deep architecture is proposed and incorporated into an end-to-end binary coding framework. Specifically, three convolutional neural networks are utilized to encode free-hand sketches, natural images and, especially, the auxiliary sketch-tokens which are adopted as bridges to mitigate the sketch-image geometric distortion. The learned DSH codes can effectively capture the cross-view similarities as well as the intrinsic semantic correlations between different categories. To the best of our knowledge, DSH is the first hashing work specifically designed for category-level SBIR with an end-to-end deep architecture. The proposed DSH is comprehensively evaluated on two large-scale datasets of TU-Berlin Extension and Sketchy, and the experiments consistently show DSH's superior SBIR accuracies over several state-of-the-art methods, while achieving significantly reduced retrieval time and memory footprint.Comment: This paper will appear as a spotlight paper in CVPR201

Snap and Find: Deep Discrete Cross-domain Garment Image Retrieval

With the increasing number of online stores, there is a pressing need for intelligent search systems to understand the item photos snapped by customers and search against large-scale product databases to find their desired items. However, it is challenging for conventional retrieval systems to match up the item photos captured by customers and the ones officially released by stores, especially for garment images. To bridge the customer- and store- provided garment photos, existing studies have been widely exploiting the clothing attributes (\textit{e.g.,} black) and landmarks (\textit{e.g.,} collar) to learn a common embedding space for garment representations. Unfortunately they omit the sequential correlation of attributes and consume large quantity of human labors to label the landmarks. In this paper, we propose a deep multi-task cross-domain hashing termed \textit{DMCH}, in which cross-domain embedding and sequential attribute learning are modeled simultaneously. Sequential attribute learning not only provides the semantic guidance for embedding, but also generates rich attention on discriminative local details (\textit{e.g.,} black buttons) of clothing items without requiring extra landmark labels. This leads to promising performance and 306$\times$ boost on efficiency when compared with the state-of-the-art models, which is demonstrated through rigorous experiments on two public fashion datasets

A Comprehensive Survey on Cross-modal Retrieval

In recent years, cross-modal retrieval has drawn much attention due to the rapid growth of multimodal data. It takes one type of data as the query to retrieve relevant data of another type. For example, a user can use a text to retrieve relevant pictures or videos. Since the query and its retrieved results can be of different modalities, how to measure the content similarity between different modalities of data remains a challenge. Various methods have been proposed to deal with such a problem. In this paper, we first review a number of representative methods for cross-modal retrieval and classify them into two main groups: 1) real-valued representation learning, and 2) binary representation learning. Real-valued representation learning methods aim to learn real-valued common representations for different modalities of data. To speed up the cross-modal retrieval, a number of binary representation learning methods are proposed to map different modalities of data into a common Hamming space. Then, we introduce several multimodal datasets in the community, and show the experimental results on two commonly used multimodal datasets. The comparison reveals the characteristic of different kinds of cross-modal retrieval methods, which is expected to benefit both practical applications and future research. Finally, we discuss open problems and future research directions.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, 9 table

A Survey on Learning to Hash

Nearest neighbor search is a problem of finding the data points from the database such that the distances from them to the query point are the smallest. Learning to hash is one of the major solutions to this problem and has been widely studied recently. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the learning to hash algorithms, categorize them according to the manners of preserving the similarities into: pairwise similarity preserving, multiwise similarity preserving, implicit similarity preserving, as well as quantization, and discuss their relations. We separate quantization from pairwise similarity preserving as the objective function is very different though quantization, as we show, can be derived from preserving the pairwise similarities. In addition, we present the evaluation protocols, and the general performance analysis, and point out that the quantization algorithms perform superiorly in terms of search accuracy, search time cost, and space cost. Finally, we introduce a few emerging topics.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions On Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI

An Efficient Approach for Geo-Multimedia Cross-Modal Retrieval

Due to the rapid development of mobile Internet techniques, cloud computation and popularity of online social networking and location-based services, massive amount of multimedia data with geographical information is generated and uploaded to the Internet. In this paper, we propose a novel type of cross-modal multimedia retrieval called geo-multimedia cross-modal retrieval which aims to search out a set of geo-multimedia objects based on geographical distance proximity and semantic similarity between different modalities. Previous studies for cross-modal retrieval and spatial keyword search cannot address this problem effectively because they do not consider multimedia data with geo-tags and do not focus on this type of query. In order to address this problem efficiently, we present the definition of $k$NN geo-multimedia cross-modal query at the first time and introduce relevant conceptions such as cross-modal semantic representation space. To bridge the semantic gap between different modalities, we propose a method named cross-modal semantic matching which contains two important component, i.e., CorrProj and LogsTran, which aims to construct a common semantic representation space for cross-modal semantic similarity measurement. Besides, we designed a framework based on deep learning techniques to implement common semantic representation space construction. In addition, a novel hybrid indexing structure named GMR-Tree combining geo-multimedia data and R-Tree is presented and a efficient $k$NN search algorithm called $k$GMCMS is designed. Comprehensive experimental evaluation on real and synthetic dataset clearly demonstrates that our solution outperforms the-state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 27 page

A Decade Survey of Content Based Image Retrieval using Deep Learning

The content based image retrieval aims to find the similar images from a large scale dataset against a query image. Generally, the similarity between the representative features of the query image and dataset images is used to rank the images for retrieval. In early days, various hand designed feature descriptors have been investigated based on the visual cues such as color, texture, shape, etc. that represent the images. However, the deep learning has emerged as a dominating alternative of hand-designed feature engineering from a decade. It learns the features automatically from the data. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of deep learning based developments in the past decade for content based image retrieval. The categorization of existing state-of-the-art methods from different perspectives is also performed for greater understanding of the progress. The taxonomy used in this survey covers different supervision, different networks, different descriptor type and different retrieval type. A performance analysis is also performed using the state-of-the-art methods. The insights are also presented for the benefit of the researchers to observe the progress and to make the best choices. The survey presented in this paper will help in further research progress in image retrieval using deep learning

Exquisitor: Interactive Learning at Large

Increasing scale is a dominant trend in today's multimedia collections, which especially impacts interactive applications. To facilitate interactive exploration of large multimedia collections, new approaches are needed that are capable of learning on the fly new analytic categories based on the visual and textual content. To facilitate general use on standard desktops, laptops, and mobile devices, they must furthermore work with limited computing resources. We present Exquisitor, a highly scalable interactive learning approach, capable of intelligent exploration of the large-scale YFCC100M image collection with extremely efficient responses from the interactive classifier. Based on relevance feedback from the user on previously suggested items, Exquisitor uses semantic features, extracted from both visual and text attributes, to suggest relevant media items to the user. Exquisitor builds upon the state of the art in large-scale data representation, compression and indexing, introducing a cluster-based retrieval mechanism that facilitates the efficient suggestions. With Exquisitor, each interaction round over the full YFCC100M collection is completed in less than 0.3 seconds using a single CPU core. That is 4x less time using 16x smaller computational resources than the most efficient state-of-the-art method, with a positive impact on result quality. These results open up many interesting research avenues, both for exploration of industry-scale media collections and for media exploration on mobile devices

Deep Collaborative Discrete Hashing with Semantic-Invariant Structure

Existing deep hashing approaches fail to fully explore semantic correlations and neglect the effect of linguistic context on visual attention learning, leading to inferior performance. This paper proposes a dual-stream learning framework, dubbed Deep Collaborative Discrete Hashing (DCDH), which constructs a discriminative common discrete space by collaboratively incorporating the shared and individual semantics deduced from visual features and semantic labels. Specifically, the context-aware representations are generated by employing the outer product of visual embeddings and semantic encodings. Moreover, we reconstruct the labels and introduce the focal loss to take advantage of frequent and rare concepts. The common binary code space is built on the joint learning of the visual representations attended by language, the semantic-invariant structure construction and the label distribution correction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method

cvpaper.challenge in 2016: Futuristic Computer Vision through 1,600 Papers Survey

The paper gives futuristic challenges disscussed in the cvpaper.challenge. In 2015 and 2016, we thoroughly study 1,600+ papers in several conferences/journals such as CVPR/ICCV/ECCV/NIPS/PAMI/IJCV