Unsupervised Image Style Embeddings for Retrieval and Recognition Tasks

Siddhartha Gairola, Rajvi Shah, P. J. Narayanan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2020, pp. 3281-3289

We propose an unsupervised protocol for learning a neural embedding of visual style of images. Style similarity is an important measure for many applications such as style transfer, fashion search, art exploration, etc. However, computational modeling of style is a difficult task owing to its vague and subjective nature. Most methods for style based retrieval use supervised training with pre-defined categorization of images according to style. While this paradigm is suitable for applications where style categories are well-defined and curating large datasets according to such a categorization is feasible, in several other cases such a categorization is either ill-defined or does not exist. Our protocol for learning style based representations does not leverage categorical labels but a proxy measure for forming triplets of anchor, similar, and dissimilar images. Using these triplets, we learn a compact style embedding that is useful for style-based search and retrieval. The learned embeddings outperform other unsupervised representations for style-based image retrieval task on six datasets that capture different meanings of style. We also show that by fine-tuning the learned features with dataset-specific style labels, we obtain best results for image style recognition task on five of six datasets.