Object Retrieval with Deep Convolutional Features

Image representations extracted from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) outdo hand-crafted features in several computer vision tasks, such as visual image retrieval. This chapter recommends a simple pipeline for encoding the local activations of a convolutional layer of a pretrained CNN utilizing the well-known Bag of Words (BoW) aggregation scheme and called bag of local convolutional features (BLCF). Matching each local array of activations in a convolutional layer to a visual word results in an assignment map, which is a compact representation relating regions of an image with a visual word. We use the assignment map for fast spatial reranking, finding object localizations that are used for query expansion. We show the suitability of the BoW representation based on local CNN features for image retrieval, attaining state-of-the-art performance on the Oxford and Paris buildings benchmarks. We demonstrate that the BLCF system outperforms the latest procedures using sum pooling for a subgroup of the challenging TRECVid INS benchmark according to the mean Average Precision (mAP) metric.