NCNet: Neighbourhood Consensus Networks for Estimating Image Correspondences.

We address the problem of finding reliable dense correspondences between a pair of images. This is a challenging task due to strong appearance differences between the corresponding scene elements and ambiguities generated by repetitive patterns. The contributions of this work are threefold. First, inspired by the classic idea of disambiguating feature matches using semi-local constraints, we develop an end-to-end trainable convolutional neural network architecture that identifies sets of spatially consistent matches by analyzing neighbourhood consensus patterns in the 4D space of all possible correspondences between a pair of images without the need for a global geometric model. Second, we demonstrate that the model can be trained effectively from weak supervision in the form of matching and non-matching image pairs without the need for costly manual annotation of point to point correspondences. Third, we show the proposed neighbourhood consensus network can be applied to a range of matching tasks including both category- and instance-level matching, obtaining the state-of-the-art results on the PF, TSS, InLoc, and HPatches benchmarks.

Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for Geometric Matching.

We address the problem of determining correspondences between two images in agreement with a geometric model such as an affine, homography or thin-plate spline transformation, and estimating its parameters. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we propose a convolutional neural network architecture for geometric matching. The architecture is based on three main components that mimic the standard steps of feature extraction, matching and simultaneous inlier detection and model parameter estimation, while being trainable end-to-end. Second, we demonstrate that the network parameters can be trained from synthetically generated imagery without the need for manual annotation and that our matching layer significantly increases generalization capabilities to never seen before images. Finally, we show that the same model can perform both instance-level and category-level matching giving state-of-the-art results on the challenging PF, TSS and Caltech-101 datasets.

24/7 Place Recognition by View Synthesis.

We address the problem of large-scale visual place recognition for situations where the scene undergoes a major change in appearance, for example, due to illumination (day/night), change of seasons, aging, or structural modifications over time such as buildings being built or destroyed. Such situations represent a major challenge for current large-scale place recognition methods. This work has the following three principal contributions. First, we demonstrate that matching across large changes in the scene appearance becomes much easier when both the query image and the database image depict the scene from approximately the same viewpoint. Second, based on this observation, we develop a new place recognition approach that combines (i) an efficient synthesis of novel views with (ii) a compact indexable image representation. Third, we introduce a new challenging dataset of 1,125 camera-phone query images of Tokyo that contain major changes in illumination (day, sunset, night) as well as structural changes in the scene. We demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other large-scale place recognition techniques on this challenging data.

NetVLAD: CNN Architecture for Weakly Supervised Place Recognition.

We tackle the problem of large scale visual place recognition, where the task is to quickly and accurately recognize the location of a given query photograph. We present the following four principal contributions. First, we develop a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that is trainable in an end-to-end manner directly for the place recognition task. The main component of this architecture, NetVLAD, is a new generalized VLAD layer, inspired by the "Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors" image representation commonly used in image retrieval. The layer is readily pluggable into any CNN architecture and amenable to training via backpropagation. Second, we create a new weakly supervised ranking loss, which enables end-to-end learning of the architecture's parameters from images depicting the same places over time downloaded from Google Street View Time Machine. Third, we develop an efficient training procedure which can be applied on very large-scale weakly labelled tasks. Finally, we show that the proposed architecture and training procedure significantly outperform non-learnt image representations and off-the-shelf CNN descriptors on challenging place recognition and image retrieval benchmarks.

On-the-fly learning for visual search of large-scale image and video datasets.

The objective of this work is to visually search large-scale video datasets for semantic entities specified by a text query. The paradigm we explore is constructing visual models for such semantic entities on-the-fly, i.e. at run time, by using an image search engine to source visual training data for the text query. The approach combines fast and accurate learning and retrieval, and enables videos to be returned within seconds of specifying a query. We describe three classes of queries, each with its associated visual search method: object instances (using a bag of visual words approach for matching); object categories (using a discriminative classifier for ranking key frames); and faces (using a discriminative classifier for ranking face tracks). We discuss the features suitable for each class of query, for example Fisher vectors or features derived from convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and how these choices impact on the trade-off between three important performance measures for a real-time system of this kind, namely: (1) accuracy, (2) memory footprint, and (3) speed. We also discuss and compare a number of important implementation issues, such as how to remove 'outliers' in the downloaded images efficiently, and how to best obtain a single descriptor for a face track. We also sketch the architecture of the real-time on-the-fly system. Quantitative results are given on a number of large-scale image and video benchmarks (e.g.  TRECVID INS, MIRFLICKR-1M), and we further demonstrate the performance and real-world applicability of our methods over a dataset sourced from 10,000 h of unedited footage from BBC News, comprising 5M+ key frames.

Extremely Low Bit-Rate Nearest Neighbor Search Using a Set Compression Tree.

The goal of this work is a data structure to support approximate nearest neighbor search on very large scale sets of vector descriptors. The criteria we wish to optimize are: (i) that the memory footprint of the representation should be very small (so that it fits into main memory); and (ii) that the approximation of the original vectors should be accurate. We introduce a novel encoding method, named a Set Compression Tree (SCT), that satisfies these criteria. It is able to accurately compress 1 million descriptors using only a few bits per descriptor. The large compression rate is achieved by not compressing on a per-descriptor basis, but instead by compressing the set of descriptors jointly. We describe the encoding, decoding and use for nearest neighbor search, all of which are quite straightforward to implement. The method, tested on standard benchmarks (SIFT1M and 80 Million Tiny Images), achieves superior performance to a number of state-of-the-art approaches, including Product Quantization, Locality Sensitive Hashing, Spectral Hashing, and Iterative Quantization. For example, SCT has a lower error using 5 bits than any of the other approaches, even when they use 16 or more bits per descriptor. We also include a comparison of all the above methods on the standard benchmarks.