This paper introduces a convolutional neural network (CNN) semantic re-ranking system to enhance the performance of sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR). Distinguished from the existing approaches, the proposed system can leverage category information brought by CNNs to support effective similarity measurement between the images. To achieve effective classification of query sketches and high-quality initial retrieval results, one CNN model is trained for classification of sketches, another for that of natural images. Through training dual CNN models, the semantic information of both the sketches and natural images is captured by deep learning. In order to measure the category similarity between images, a category similarity measurement method is proposed. Category information is then used for re-ranking. Re-ranking operation first infers the retrieval category of the query sketch and then uses the category similarity measurement to measure the category similarity between the query sketch and each initial retrieval result. Finally, the initial retrieval results are re-ranked. The experiments on different types of SBIR datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed re-ranking method. Comparisons with other re-ranking algorithms are also given to show the proposed method's superiority. Further, compared to the baseline systems, the proposed re-ranking approach achieves significantly higher precision in the top ten different SBIR methods and datasets.

Effectively modeling a collection of three-dimensional (3-D) faces is an important task in various applications, especially facial expression-driven ones, e.g., expression generation, retargeting, and synthesis. These 3-D faces naturally form a set of second-order tensors-one modality for identity and the other for expression. The number of these second-order tensors is three times of that of the vertices for 3-D face modeling. As for algorithms, Bayesian data modeling, which is a natural data analysis tool, has been widely applied with great success; however, it works only for vector data. Therefore, there is a gap between tensor-based representation and vector-based data analysis tools. Aiming at bridging this gap and generalizing conventional statistical tools over tensors, this paper proposes a decoupled probabilistic algorithm, which is named Bayesian tensor analysis (BTA). Theoretically, BTA can automatically and suitably determine dimensionality for different modalities of tensor data. With BTA, a collection of 3-D faces can be well modeled. Empirical studies on expression retargeting also justify the advantages of BTA.

Hashing compresses high-dimensional features into compact binary codes. It is one of the promising techniques to support efficient mobile image retrieval, due to its low data transmission cost and fast retrieval response. However, most of existing hashing strategies simply rely on low-level features. Thus, they may generate hashing codes with limited discriminative capability. Moreover, many of them fail to exploit complex and high-order semantic correlations that inherently exist among images. Motivated by these observations, we propose a novel unsupervised hashing scheme, called topic hypergraph hashing (THH), to address the limitations. THH effectively mitigates the semantic shortage of hashing codes by exploiting auxiliary texts around images. In our method, relations between images and semantic topics are first discovered via robust collective non-negative matrix factorization. Afterwards, a unified topic hypergraph, where images and topics are represented with independent vertices and hyperedges, respectively, is constructed to model inherent high-order semantic correlations of images. Finally, hashing codes and functions are learned by simultaneously enforcing semantic consistence and preserving the discovered semantic relations. Experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate that THH can achieve superior performance compared with several state-of-the-art methods, and it is more suitable for mobile image retrieval.

Person retrieval largely relies on the appearance features of pedestrians. This task is rather more difficult in surveillance videos due to the limitations of extracting robust appearance features brought by the cross-view and cross-camera data with lower image resolution, motion blur, occlusion and other kinds of image degradation. To build up a more reliable person retrieval system, recent works introduced appearance attribute models to describe and distinguish different persons with high-level semantic concepts. Despite the progress of previous works, the value of utilizing appearance attributes is still under-explored. On one hand, existing methods lack for concise and precise attribute representations that are specific for each attribute category and, in the meantime, are able to filter noisy information in irrelevant spatial locations and useless patterns. On the other hand, correlation and reasoning between different attributes are neglected, which could generate more useful information and add more robustness to the retrieval system. In this paper, we propose an Attribute Mining and Reasoning (AMR) framework which is capable to handle the issues in question. The AMR makes better use of appearance attributes with two main components. First, the AMR disentangles the representations of different attributes by localizing their spatial positions and identifying their effective patterns in a weakly supervised manner. To achieve more reliable localization, we propose the Attribute Localization Ensemble (ALE) module that is consisted of multiple localization heads and a voting mechanism. Second, we introduce the Attribute Reasoning (AR) module to correlate different attributes together with the global appearance features and discover their latent relations to generate more comprehensive descriptions of pedestrians. Extensive experiments on DukeMTMC-ReID and Market-1501 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed AMR framework as well as its superiority over the existing state-of-the-art methods. The AMR model also shows great generalization ability on the unseen CUHK03 dataset when it is only trained on Market-1501 dataset.

People's daily information sharing and acquisition through the Internet has become more and more popular. The comprehensive multimodal marketing advertorial generated by We Media accounts besides the normal social news is gaining its importance on social media platforms. In order to achieve effective advertising, the marketing intent understanding is a key step towards generating targeted advertising strategies (push advertorials to specific people at a specific time). However, advertorials in real are usually designed to pretend as normal social news with a wide range of contents. This poses big challenges to the platforms on accurately recognizing and analyzing the marketing intents behind the advertorials. As a pioneering study, we address this new problem of multimodal-based marketing intent analysis and answer three core questions: (1) does a piece of social news contain marketing intent (2) what is the topic of marketing intent (3) what is the extent of marketing intent Towards this end, we propose a novel Multimodal-based Marketing Intent Analysis scheme (MMIA) to estimate the marketing intent embedded in the multimodal contents. Specifically, a novel supervised neural autoregressive model (SmiDocNADE) is proposed to enhance the discriminative capacity of the learned hidden features so that a single system is capable of solving the three questions. In order to effectively model inter-correlations between images and text in advertorials, we fuse multimodal data and extract features by Graph Convolution Networks as an enhancement to SmiDocNADE. The extensive evaluations demonstrate the advantages of our proposed system in multimodal-based marketing intent analysis from multiple aspects.

Contrastive learning has been successfully applied in unsupervised representation learning. However, the generalization ability of representation learning is limited by the fact that the loss of downstream tasks (e.g., classification) is rarely taken into account while designing contrastive methods. In this article, we propose a new contrastive-based unsupervised graph representation learning (UGRL) framework by 1) maximizing the mutual information (MI) between the semantic information and the structural information of the data and 2) designing three constraints to simultaneously consider the downstream tasks and the representation learning. As a result, our proposed method outputs robust low-dimensional representations. Experimental results on 11 public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method is superior over recent state-of-the-art methods in terms of different downstream tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/LarryUESTC/GRLC.