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

Critical Thickness Ratio for Buckled and Wrinkled Fruits and Vegetables

Fruits and vegetables are usually composed of exocarp and sarcocarp and they take a variety of shapes when they are ripe. Buckled and wrinkled fruits and vegetables are often observed. This work aims at establishing the geometrical constraint for buckled and wrinkled shapes based on a mechanical model. The mismatch of expansion rate between the exocarp and sarcocarp can produce a compressive stress on the exocarp. We model a fruit/vegetable with exocarp and sarcocarp as a hyperelastic layer-substrate structure subjected to uniaxial compression. The derived bifurcation condition contains both geometrical and material constants. However, a careful analysis on this condition leads to the finding of a critical thickness ratio which separates the buckling and wrinkling modes, and remarkably, which is independent of the material stiffnesses. More specifically, it is found that if the thickness ratio is smaller than this critical value a fruit/vegetable should be in a buckling mode (under a sufficient stress); if a fruit/vegetable in a wrinkled shape the thickness ratio is always larger than this critical value. To verify the theoretical prediction, we consider four types of buckled fruits/vegetables and four types of wrinkled fruits/vegetables with three samples in each type. The geometrical parameters for the 24 samples are measured and it is found that indeed all the data fall into the theoretically predicted buckling or wrinkling domains. Some practical applications based on this critical thickness ratio are briefly discussed.Comment: 11 pages 9 figures 2 table

Development Power and Derivative Process: A Mode and Theory for Macroeconomy Analysis

Stating from the basic characteristics of economic production and based on the partial distribution [F.Dai, 2001], this paper advance the concept of development power, give its basic models, and try to establish a theory of describing and analyzing the macro-economy ©¤ the development power and derivative process. By means of the development power theory, we can explain and resolve some important problems in macro-economy researches, such as how the economic cycle be formed, what is the reason that economic outputs vary violently, etc. And by the derivative process model, we can give out the indexes of valuating development power and development vitality in economy process, analyze the macroscopic course of economic development, and compute the beginning time and ending time of the economy cycle depending on the accumulating and releasing development power. Finally, we analyze emphatically the DP movement in economy development of China and USA in recent several decades, in order to show the realistic background and the creditability of development power and derivative processpartial distribution, macroeconomics, development power (DP), derivative process, analytic model

Quantization Bounds on Grassmann Manifolds and Applications to MIMO Communications

This paper considers the quantization problem on the Grassmann manifold \mathcal{G}_{n,p}, the set of all p-dimensional planes (through the origin) in the n-dimensional Euclidean space. The chief result is a closed-form formula for the volume of a metric ball in the Grassmann manifold when the radius is sufficiently small. This volume formula holds for Grassmann manifolds with arbitrary dimension n and p, while previous results pertained only to p=1, or a fixed p with asymptotically large n. Based on this result, several quantization bounds are derived for sphere packing and rate distortion tradeoff. We establish asymptotically equivalent lower and upper bounds for the rate distortion tradeoff. Since the upper bound is derived by constructing random codes, this result implies that the random codes are asymptotically optimal. The above results are also extended to the more general case, in which \mathcal{G}_{n,q} is quantized through a code in \mathcal{G}_{n,p}, where p and q are not necessarily the same. Finally, we discuss some applications of the derived results to multi-antenna communication systems.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory in Aug, 200