Effective Conditioned and Composed Image Retrieval Combining CLIP-Based Features

Alberto Baldrati, Marco Bertini, Tiberio Uricchio, Alberto Del Bimbo; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 21466-21474

Conditioned and composed image retrieval extend CBIR systems by combining a query image with an additional text that expresses the intent of the user, describing additional requests w.r.t. the visual content of the query image. This type of search is interesting for e-commerce applications, e.g. to develop interactive multimodal searches and chatbots. In this demo, we present an interactive system based on a combiner network, trained using contrastive learning, that combines visual and textual features obtained from the OpenAI CLIP network to address conditioned CBIR. The system can be used to improve e-shop search engines. For example, considering the fashion domain it lets users search for dresses, shirts and toptees using a candidate start image and expressing some visual differences w.r.t. its visual content, e.g. asking to change color, pattern or shape. The proposed network obtains state-of-the-art performance on the FashionIQ dataset and on the more recent CIRR dataset, showing its applicability to the fashion domain for conditioned retrieval, and to more generic content considering the more general task of composed image retrieval.