Fine-Grained Image Retrieval via Object Localization

Abstract

In this paper, a network consisting of an object localization module and a discriminative feature extraction module is designed for fine-grained image retrieval (FGIR). In order to reduce the interference of complex backgrounds, the object localization module is introduced into the network before feature extraction. By selecting the convolutional feature descriptors, the main object is separated from the background, and thus, most of the interference is filtered out. Further, in order to improve the overall performance of the network, a discriminative filter bank is introduced into the network as the local feature detector. Hence, the local discriminative features can be extracted directly from the original feature map. The experimental results based on the CUB-200-2011 and Cars-196 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the performance of FGIR.