This paper addresses the problem of Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (SBIR), for which bridge the gap between the data representations of sketch images and photo images is considered as the key. Previous works mostly focus on learning a feature space to minimize intra-class distances for both sketches and photos. In contrast, we propose a novel loss function, named Euclidean Margin Softmax (EMS), that not only minimizes intra-class distances but also maximizes inter-class distances simultaneously. It enables us to learn a feature space with high discriminability, leading to highly accurate retrieval. In addition, this loss function is applied to a conditional network architecture, which could incorporate the prior knowledge of whether a sample is a sketch or a photo. We show that the conditional information can be conveniently incorporated to the recently proposed Squeeze and Excitation (SE) module, lead to a conditional SE (CSE) module. Extensive experiments are conducted on two widely used SBIR benchmark datasets. Our approach, although being very simple, achieved new state-of-the-art on both datasets, surpassing existing methods by a large margin.
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@cite_47: Recent work has shown that convolutional networks can be substantially deeper, more accurate, and efficient to train if they contain shorter connections between layers close to the input and those close to the output. In this paper, we embrace this observation and introduce the Dense Convolutional Network (DenseNet), which connects each layer to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion. Whereas traditional convolutional networks with L layers have L connections - one between each layer and its subsequent layer - our network has L(L+1) 2 direct connections. For each layer, the feature-maps of all preceding layers are used as inputs, and its own feature-maps are used as inputs into all subsequent layers. DenseNets have several compelling advantages: they alleviate the vanishing-gradient problem, strengthen feature propagation, encourage feature reuse, and substantially reduce the number of parameters. We evaluate our proposed architecture on four highly competitive object recognition benchmark tasks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet). DenseNets obtain significant improvements over the state-of-the-art on most of them, whilst requiring less computation to achieve high performance. Code and pre-trained models are available at this https URL .
@cite_31: Visual understanding is often based on measuring similarity between observations. Learning similarities specific to a certain perception task from a set of examples has been shown advantageous in various computer vision and pattern recognition problems. In many important applications, the data that one needs to compare come from different representations or modalities, and the similarity between such data operates on objects that may have different and often incommensurable structure and dimensionality. In this paper, we propose a framework for supervised similarity learning based on embedding the input data from two arbitrary spaces into the Hamming space. The mapping is expressed as a binary classification problem with positive and negative examples, and can be efficiently learned using boosting algorithms. The utility and efficiency of such a generic approach is demonstrated on several challenging applications including cross-representation shape retrieval and alignment of multi-modal medical images.
@cite_18: Due to its low storage cost and fast query speed, hashing has been widely adopted for similarity search in multimedia data. In particular, more and more attentions have been payed to multimodal hashing for search in multimedia data with multiple modalities, such as images with tags. Typically, supervised information of semantic labels is also available for the data points in many real applications. Hence, many supervised multimodal hashing (SMH) methods have been proposed to utilize such semantic labels to further improve the search accuracy. However, the training time complexity of most existing SMH methods is too high, which makes them unscalable to large-scale datasets. In this paper, a novel SMH method, called semantic correlation maximization (SCM), is proposed to seamlessly integrate semantic labels into the hashing learning procedure for large-scale data modeling. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show that SCM can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art SMH methods, in terms of both accuracy and scalability.
@cite_33: Nowadays images on social networking websites (e.g., Flickr) are mostly accompanied with user-contributed tags, which help cast a new light on the conventional content-based image analysis tasks such as image classification and retrieval. In order to establish a scalable social image analysis system, two issues need to be considered: 1) Supervised learning is a futile task in modeling the enormous number of concepts in the world, whereas unsupervised approaches overcome this hurdle; 2) Algorithms are required to be both spatially and temporally efficient to handle large-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose a cross-view feature learning (CVFL) framework to handle the problem of social image analysis effectively and efficiently. Through explicitly modeling the relevance between image content and tags (which is empirically shown to be visually and semantically meaningful), CVFL yields more promising results than existing methods in the experiments. More importantly, being general and descriptive, CVFL and its variants can be readily applied to other large-scale multi-view tasks in unsupervised setting.
@cite_8: Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers---8x deeper than VGG nets but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57 error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28 relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.
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@cite_29: 
@cite_9: We introduce Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis (DCCA), a method to learn complex nonlinear transformations of two views of data such that the resulting representations are highly linearly correlated. Parameters of both transformations are jointly learned to maximize the (regularized) total correlation. It can be viewed as a nonlinear extension of the linear method canonical correlation analysis (CCA). It is an alternative to the nonparametric method kernel canonical correlation analysis (KCCA) for learning correlated nonlinear transformations. Unlike KCCA, DCCA does not require an inner product, and has the advantages of a parametric method: training time scales well with data size and the training data need not be referenced when computing the representations of unseen instances. In experiments on two real-world datasets, we find that DCCA learns representations with significantly higher correlation than those learned by CCA and KCCA. We also introduce a novel non-saturating sigmoid function based on the cube root that may be useful more generally in feedforward neural networks.
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@cite_52: In reality, data objects often belong to several different categories simultaneously, which are semantically correlated to each other. Multi-label learning can handle and extract useful information from such kind of data effectively. Since it has a great variety of potential applications, multi-label learning has attracted widespread attention from many domains. However, two major challenges still remain for multi-label learning: high dimensionality and correlations of data. In this paper, we address the problems by using the technique of partial least squares (PLS) and propose a new multi-label learning method called rPLSML (regularized Partial Least Squares for Multi-label Learning). Specifically, we exploit PLS discriminant analysis to identify a latent and common space from the variable and label spaces of data, and then construct a learning model based on the latent space. To tackle the multi-collinearity problem raised from the high dimensionality, a ( _2 )-norm penalty is further exerted on the optimization problem. The experimental results on public data sets show that rPLSML has better performance than the state-of-the-art multi-label learning algorithms.
@cite_6: We propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture codenamed "Inception", which was responsible for setting the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC 2014). The main hallmark of this architecture is the improved utilization of the computing resources inside the network. This was achieved by a carefully crafted design that allows for increasing the depth and width of the network while keeping the computational budget constant. To optimize quality, the architectural decisions were based on the Hebbian principle and the intuition of multi-scale processing. One particular incarnation used in our submission for ILSVRC 2014 is called GoogLeNet, a 22 layers deep network, the quality of which is assessed in the context of classification and detection.
@cite_19: With benefits of low storage costs and high query speeds, hashing methods are widely researched for efficiently retrieving large-scale data, which commonly contains multiple views, e.g. a news report with images, videos and texts. In this paper, we study the problem of cross-view retrieval and propose an effective Semantics-Preserving Hashing method, termed SePH. Given semantic affinities of training data as supervised information, SePH transforms them into a probability distribution and approximates it with to-be-learnt hash codes in Hamming space via minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence. Then kernel logistic regression with a sampling strategy is utilized to learn the nonlinear projections from features in each view to the learnt hash codes. And for any unseen instance, predicted hash codes and their corresponding output probabilities from observed views are utilized to determine its unified hash code, using a novel probabilistic approach. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets well demonstrate the effectiveness and reasonableness of SePH.
@cite_40: Nearest neighbor search methods based on hashing have attracted considerable attention for effective and efficient large-scale similarity search in computer vision and information retrieval community. In this paper, we study the problems of learning hash functions in the context of multimodal data for cross-view similarity search. We put forward a novel hashing method, which is referred to Collective Matrix Factorization Hashing (CMFH). CMFH learns unified hash codes by collective matrix factorization with latent factor model from different modalities of one instance, which can not only supports cross-view search but also increases the search accuracy by merging multiple view information sources. We also prove that CMFH, a similarity-preserving hashing learning method, has upper and lower boundaries. Extensive experiments verify that CMFH significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on three different datasets.
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@cite_46: We present a simple, highly modularized network architecture for image classification. Our network is constructed by repeating a building block that aggregates a set of transformations with the same topology. Our simple design results in a homogeneous, multi-branch architecture that has only a few hyper-parameters to set. This strategy exposes a new dimension, which we call "cardinality" (the size of the set of transformations), as an essential factor in addition to the dimensions of depth and width. On the ImageNet-1K dataset, we empirically show that even under the restricted condition of maintaining complexity, increasing cardinality is able to improve classification accuracy. Moreover, increasing cardinality is more effective than going deeper or wider when we increase the capacity. Our models, named ResNeXt, are the foundations of our entry to the ILSVRC 2016 classification task in which we secured 2nd place. We further investigate ResNeXt on an ImageNet-5K set and the COCO detection set, also showing better results than its ResNet counterpart. The code and models are publicly available online.
@cite_16: Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) is a classical tool in statistical analysis that measures the linear relationship between two or several data sets. In [1] it was shown that CCA of M = 2 data sets can be reformulated as a pair of coupled least squares (LS) problems. Here, we generalize this idea to M > 2 data sets. First, we present a batch algorithm to extract all the canonical vectors through an iterative regression procedure, which at each iteration uses as desired output the mean of the outputs obtained in the previous iteration. Furthermore, this alternative formulation of CCA as M coupled regression problems allows us to derive in a straightforward manner a recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm for online CCA. The proposed batch and on-line algorithms are applied to blind equalization of single-input multiple-output (SIMO) channels. Some simulation results show that the CCA-based algorithms outperform other techniques based on second-order statistics for this particular application.
@cite_10: Human sketches are unique in being able to capture both the spatial topology of a visual object, as well as its subtle appearance details. Fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) importantly leverages on such fine-grained characteristics of sketches to conduct instance-level retrieval of photos. Nevertheless, human sketches are often highly abstract and iconic, resulting in severe misalignments with candidate photos which in turn make subtle visual detail matching difficult. Existing FG-SBIR approaches focus only on coarse holistic matching via deep cross-domain representation learning, yet ignore explicitly accounting for fine-grained details and their spatial context. In this paper, a novel deep FG-SBIR model is proposed which differs significantly from the existing models in that: (1) It is spatially aware, achieved by introducing an attention module that is sensitive to the spatial position of visual details: (2) It combines coarse and fine semantic information via a shortcut connection fusion block: and (3) It models feature correlation and is robust to misalignments between the extracted features across the two domains by introducing a novel higher-order learnable energy function (HOLEF) based loss. Extensive experiments show that the proposed deep spatial-semantic attention model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art.
Representation learning is studied in computer vision community @cite_8 @cite_46 @cite_47 @cite_28 @cite_6 @cite_1 ; but the sketch-based representation learning is relatively less studies @cite_29 @cite_10 . Among all the different deep architectures have been investigated and studied, such as ResNet, ResNeXt, and DenseNet. Among them, ResNeXt @cite_46 incorporated both the residual learning and group convolution; and thus it is adopted as the building structure in this paper. The recent SE module @cite_28 made networks capable of choosing relatively important channels with feature maps, and thus it is also used here. Remarkably, to effectively embed cross domain features, several hashing methods @cite_40 @cite_31 @cite_50 @cite_18 @cite_19 @cite_30 and cross-modal embedding methods @cite_9 @cite_16 @cite_52 @cite_33 have been studied.