Deep Graph Convolutional Quantization Networks for Image Retrieval

To achieve real-time online search, most image retrieval methods aim to learn compact feature representation while keeping their semantic information or intra-class relevance. In this paper, we propose a new compact feature learning method to embed the underlying manifold information from database. It integrates deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and graph convolutional neural networks (GCN) into a unified end-to-end learning framework. In the proposed method, the deep feature extracted by CNN is automatically embedded with the information from its neighbors by GCN, which possesses the ability of exploring the semantic relevance on the database manifold. Since constructing a graph over the whole database costs unaffordable memory, we build a landmark graph as database sketch. The landmark graph contains two kinds of nodes, including codewords and memory bank samples. Given an image, the deep architecture outputs the discriminative feature and its similarity with all the graph nodes. We directly use the indices of the most similar codeword nodes as the compact feature representation. To make the proposed method scalable to large datasets, a multi-graph strategy is adopted to generate compact features with adaptable code length. The experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.