One-Shot Fine-Grained Instance Retrieval

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new large-scale fine-grained instance retrieval task that enables identifying unseen objects with minimal training data, using a specialized dataset and a coarse-to-fine retrieval framework.

Contribution

It proposes the OSFGIR task, a new dataset OSFGIR-378K, and a novel retrieval framework combining CN-Nets and a coarse-to-fine approach for large-scale fine-grained identification.

Findings

Achieves higher accuracy than existing FGVC methods

Demonstrates improved efficiency in large-scale retrieval

Enables recognition of unseen objects with minimal training data

Abstract

Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC) has achieved significant progress recently. However, the number of fine-grained species could be huge and dynamically increasing in real scenarios, making it difficult to recognize unseen objects under the current FGVC framework. This raises an open issue to perform large-scale fine-grained identification without a complete training set. Aiming to conquer this issue, we propose a retrieval task named One-Shot Fine-Grained Instance Retrieval (OSFGIR). "One-Shot" denotes the ability of identifying unseen objects through a fine-grained retrieval task assisted with an incomplete auxiliary training set. This paper first presents the detailed description to OSFGIR task and our collected OSFGIR-378K dataset. Next, we propose the Convolutional and Normalization Networks (CN-Nets) learned on the auxiliary dataset to generate a concise and discriminative representation. Finally, we present a coarse-to-fine retrieval framework consisting of three components, i.e., coarse retrieval, fine-grained retrieval, and query expansion, respectively. The framework progressively retrieves images with similar semantics, and performs fine-grained identification. Experiments show our OSFGIR framework achieves significantly better accuracy and efficiency than existing FGVC and image retrieval methods, thus could be a better solution for large-scale fine-grained object identification.