Learning Deep Local Features With Multiple Dynamic Attentions for Large-Scale Image Retrieval

Hui Wu, Min Wang, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 11416-11425

In image retrieval, learning local features with deep convolutional networks has been demonstrated effective to improve the performance. To discriminate deep local features, some research efforts turn to attention learning. However, existing attention-based methods only generate a single attention map for each image, which limits the exploration of diverse visual patterns. To this end, we propose a novel deep local feature learning architecture to simultaneously focus on multiple discriminative local patterns in an image. In our framework, we first adaptively reorganize the channels of activation maps for multiple heads. For each head, a new dynamic attention module is designed to learn the potential attentions. The whole architecture is trained as metric learning of weighted-sum-pooled global image features, with only image-level relevance label. After the architecture training, for each database image, we select local features based on their multi-head dynamic attentions, which are further indexed for efficient retrieval. Extensive experiments show the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the Revisited Oxford and Paris datasets. Besides, it typically achieves competitive results even using local features with lower dimensions.