Neuromorphic computing mimics the neural activity of the brain through emulating spiking neural networks. In numerous machine learning tasks, neuromorphic chips are expected to provide superior solutions in terms of cost and power efficiency. Here, we explore the application of Loihi, a neuromorphic computing chip developed by Intel, for the computer vision task of image retrieval. We evaluated the functionalities and the performance metrics that are critical in content-based visual search and recommender systems using deep-learning embeddings. Our results show that the neuromorphic solution is about 2.5 times more energy-efficient compared with an ARM Cortex-A72 CPU and 12.5 times more energy-efficient compared with NVIDIA T4 GPU for inference by a lightweight convolutional neural network without batching while maintaining the same level of matching accuracy. The study validates the potential of neuromorphic computing in low-power image retrieval, as a complementary paradigm to the existing von Neumann architectures.
Lesion images are frequently taken in open-set settings. Because of this, the image data generated is extremely varied in nature.It is difficult for a convolutional neural network to find proper features and generalise well, as a result content based image retrieval (CBIR) system for lesion images are difficult to build. This paper explores this domain and proposes multiple similarity measures which uses Style Loss and Dice Coefficient via a novel similarity measure called I1-Score. Out of the CBIR similarity measures proposed, pure style loss approach achieves a remarkable accuracy increase over traditional approaches like Euclidean Distance and Cosine Similarity. The I1-Scores using style loss performed better than traditional approaches by a small margin, whereas, I1-Scores with dice-coefficient faired very poorly. The model used is trained using ensemble learning for better generalization.
In recent years a vast amount of visual content has been generated and shared from various fields, such as social media platforms, medical images, and robotics. This abundance of content creation and sharing has introduced new challenges. In particular, searching databases for similar content, i.e. content based image retrieval (CBIR), is a long-established research area, and more efficient and accurate methods are needed for real time retrieval. Artificial intelligence has made progress in CBIR and has significantly facilitated the process of intelligent search. In this survey we organize and review recent CBIR works that are developed based on deep learning algorithms and techniques, including insights and techniques from recent papers. We identify and present the commonly-used databases, benchmarks, and evaluation methods used in the field. We collect common challenges and propose promising future directions. More specifically, we focus on image retrieval with deep learning and organize the state of the art methods according to the types of deep network structure, deep features, feature enhancement methods, and network fine-tuning strategies. Our survey considers a wide variety of recent methods, aiming to promote a global view of the field of category-based CBIR.
Fast and scalable Content-Based Image Retrieval using visual features is required for document analysis, Medical image analysis, etc. in the present age. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) activations as features achieved their outstanding performance in this area. Deep Convolutional representations using the softmax function in the output layer are also ones among visual features. However, almost all the image retrieval systems hold their index of visual features on main memory in order to high responsiveness, limiting their applicability for big data applications. In this paper, we propose a fast calculation method of cosine similarity with L2 norm indexed in advance on Elasticsearch. We evaluate our approach with ImageNet Dataset and VGG-16 pre-trained model. The evaluation results show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.
We present an analysis of embeddings extracted from different pre-trained models for content-based image retrieval. Specifically, we study embeddings from image classification and object detection models. We discover that even with additional human annotations such as bounding boxes and segmentation masks, the discriminative power of the embeddings based on modern object detection models is significantly worse than their classification counterparts for the retrieval task. At the same time, our analysis also unearths that object detection model can help retrieval task by acting as a hard attention module for extracting object embeddings that focus on salient region from the convolutional feature map. In order to efficiently extract object embeddings, we introduce a simple guided student-teacher training paradigm for learning discriminative embeddings within the object detection framework. We support our findings with strong experimental results.
Image-level feature descriptors obtained from convolutional neural networks have shown powerful representation capabilities for image retrieval. In this paper, we present an unsupervised method to aggregate deep convolutional features into compact yet discriminative image vectors by simulating the dynamics of heat diffusion. A distinctive problem in image retrieval is that repetitive or bursty features tend to dominate feature representations, leading to less than ideal matches. We show that by leveraging elegant properties of the heat equation, our method is able to avoiding over-representation of bursty features. We additionally present a theoretical time complexity analysis showing the efficiency of our method, which is further demonstrated in our experimental evaluation. Finally, we extensively evaluate the proposed approach with pre-trained and fine-tuned deep networks on common public benchmarks, and show superior performance compared to previous work.
Image-level feature descriptors obtained from convolutional neural networks have shown powerful representation capabilities for image retrieval. In this paper, we present an unsupervised method to aggregate deep convolutional features into compact yet discriminative image vectors by simulating the dynamics of heat diffusion. A distinctive problem in image retrieval is that repetitive or bursty features tend to dominate feature representations, leading to less than ideal matches. We show that by leveraging elegant properties of the heat equation, our method is able to select informative features while avoiding over-representation of bursty features. We additionally present a theoretical time complexity analysis showing the efficiency of our method, which is further demonstrated in our experimental evaluation. Finally, we extensively evaluate the proposed approach with pre-trained and fine-tuned deep networks on common public benchmarks, and show superior performance compared to previous work.
Existing methods for interactive image retrieval have demonstrated the merit of integrating user feedback, improving retrieval results. However, most current systems rely on restricted forms of user feedback, such as binary relevance responses, or feedback based on a fixed set of relative attributes, which limits their impact. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to interactive image search that enables users to provide feedback via natural language, allowing for more natural and effective interaction. We formulate the task of dialog-based interactive image retrieval as a reinforcement learning problem, and reward the dialog system for improving the rank of the target image during each dialog turn. To avoid the cumbersome and costly process of collecting human-machine conversations as the dialog system learns, we train our system with a user simulator, which is itself trained to describe the differences between target and candidate images. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated in a footwear retrieval application. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world data show that 1) our proposed learning framework achieves better accuracy than other supervised and reinforcement learning baselines and 2) user feedback based on natural language rather than pre-specified attributes leads to more effective retrieval results, and a more natural and expressive communication interface.
In this paper we address issues with image retrieval benchmarking on standard and popular Oxford 5k and Paris 6k datasets. In particular, annotation errors, the size of the dataset, and the level of challenge are addressed: new annotation for both datasets is created with an extra attention to the reliability of the ground truth. Three new protocols of varying difficulty are introduced. The protocols allow fair comparison between different methods, including those using a dataset pre-processing stage. For each dataset, 15 new challenging queries are introduced. Finally, a new set of 1M hard, semi-automatically cleaned distractors is selected. An extensive comparison of the state-of-the-art methods is performed on the new benchmark. Different types of methods are evaluated, ranging from local-feature-based to modern CNN based methods. The best results are achieved by taking the best of the two worlds. Most importantly, image retrieval appears far from being solved.
Deep distance metric learning (DDML), which is proposed to learn image similarity metrics in an end-to-end manner based on the convolution neural network, has achieved encouraging results in many computer vision tasks.$L2$-normalization in the embedding space has been used to improve the performance of several DDML methods. However, the commonly used Euclidean distance is no longer an accurate metric for $L2$-normalized embedding space, i.e., a hyper-sphere. Another challenge of current DDML methods is that their loss functions are usually based on rigid data formats, such as the triplet tuple. Thus, an extra process is needed to prepare data in specific formats. In addition, their losses are obtained from a limited number of samples, which leads to a lack of the global view of the embedding space. In this paper, we replace the Euclidean distance with the cosine similarity to better utilize the $L2$-normalization, which is able to attenuate the curse of dimensionality. More specifically, a novel loss function based on the von Mises-Fisher distribution is proposed to learn a compact hyper-spherical embedding space. Moreover, a new efficient learning algorithm is developed to better capture the global structure of the embedding space. Experiments for both classification and retrieval tasks on several standard datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with a simpler training procedure. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, even with a small number of convolutional layers, our model can still obtain significantly better classification performance than the widely used softmax loss.
Content based video retrieval is an approach for facilitating the searching and browsing of large image collections over World Wide Web. In this approach, video analysis is conducted on low level visual properties extracted from video frame. We believed that in order to create an effective video retrieval system, visual perception must be taken into account. We conjectured that a technique which employs multiple features for indexing and retrieval would be more effective in the discrimination and search tasks of videos. In order to validate this claim, content based indexing and retrieval systems were implemented using color histogram, various texture features and other approaches. Videos were stored in Oracle 9i Database and a user study measured correctness of response.