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Smooth-AP: Smoothing the Path Towards Large-Scale Image Retrieval

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Optimising a ranking-based metric, such as Average Precision (AP), is notoriously challenging due to the fact that it is non-differentiable, and hence cannot be optimised directly using gradient-descent methods. To this end, we introduce an objective that optimises instead a smoothed approximation of AP, coined Smooth-AP. Smooth-AP is a plug-and-play objective function that allows for end-to-end training of deep networks with a simple and elegant implementation. We also present an analysis for why directly optimising the ranking based metric of AP offers benefits over other deep metric learning losses. We apply Smooth-AP to standard retrieval benchmarks: Stanford Online products and VehicleID, and also evaluate on larger-scale datasets: INaturalist for fine-grained category retrieval, and VGGFace2 and IJB-C for face retrieval. In all cases, we improve the performance over the state-of-the-art, especially for larger-scale datasets, thus demonstrating the effectiveness and scalability of Smooth-AP to real-world scenarios.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationComputer Vision – ECCV 2020 - 16th European Conference, 2020, Proceedings
EditorsAndrea Vedaldi, Horst Bischof, Thomas Brox, Jan-Michael Frahm
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages677-694
Number of pages18
ISBN (Print)9783030585440
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event16th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2020 - Glasgow, United Kingdom
Duration: 23 Aug 202028 Aug 2020

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12354 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference16th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityGlasgow
Period23/08/2028/08/20

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