The computation of good image descriptors is key to the instance retrieval problem and has been the object of much recent interest from the multimedia research community. With deep learning becoming the dominant approach in computer vision, the use of representations extracted from Convolutional Neural Nets (CNNs) is quickly gaining ground on Fisher Vectors (FVs) as favoured state-of-the-art global image descriptors for image instance retrieval. While the good performance of CNNs for image classification are unambiguously recognised, which of the two has the upper hand in the image retrieval context is not entirely clear yet.In this work, we propose a comprehensive study that systematically evaluates FVs and CNNs for image retrieval. The first part compares the performances of FVs and CNNs on multiple publicly available data sets. We investigate a number of details specific to each method. For FVs, we compare sparse descriptors based on interest point detectors with dense single-scale and multi-scale variants. For CNNs, we focus on understanding the impact of depth, architecture and training data on retrieval results. Our study shows that no descriptor is systematically better than the other and that performance gains can usually be obtained by using both types together. The second part of the study focuses on the impact of geometrical transformations such as rotations and scale changes. FVs based on interest point detectors are intrinsically resilient to such transformations while CNNs do not have a built-in mechanism to ensure such invariance. We show that performance of CNNs can quickly degrade in presence of rotations while they are far less affected by changes in scale. We then propose a number of ways to incorporate the required invariances in the CNN pipeline.Overall, our work is intended as a reference guide offering practically useful and simply implementable guidelines to anyone looking for state-of-the-art global descriptors best suited to their specific image instance retrieval problem. * V. Chandrasekhar, J. Lin and O. Morère contributed equally to this work.

Image instance retrieval is the problem of retrieving images from a database which contain the same object. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based descriptors are becoming the dominant approach for generating global image descriptors for the instance retrieval problem. One major drawback of CNN-based global descriptors is that uncompressed deep neural network models require hundreds of megabytes of storage making them inconvenient to deploy in mobile applications or in custom hardware. In this work, we study the problem of neural network model compression focusing on the image instance retrieval task. We study quantization, coding, pruning and weight sharing techniques for reducing model size for the instance retrieval problem. We provide extensive experimental results on the trade-off between retrieval performance and model size for different types of networks on several data sets providing the most comprehensive study on this topic. We compress models to the order of a few MBs: two orders of magnitude smaller than the uncompressed models while achieving negligible loss in retrieval performance.

The first step in an image retrieval pipeline consists of comparing global descriptors from a large database to find a short list of candidate matching images. The more compact the global descriptor, the faster the descriptors can be compared for matching. State-of-the-art global descriptors based on Fisher Vectors are represented with tens of thousands of floating point numbers. While there is significant work on compression of local descriptors, there is relatively little work on compression of high dimensional Fisher Vectors. We study the problem of global descriptor compression in the context of image retrieval, focusing on extremely compact binary representations: 64-1024 bits. Motivated by the remarkable success of deep neural networks in recent literature, we propose a compression scheme based on deeply stacked Restricted Boltzmann Machines (SRBM), which learn lower dimensional non-linear subspaces on which the data lie. We provide a thorough evaluation of several state-of-the-art compression schemes based on PCA, Locality Sensitive Hashing, Product Quantization and greedy bit selection, and show that the proposed compression scheme outperforms all existing schemes.