Ing. Nikolaos Efthymiadis

This work introduces composed image retrieval to remote sensing. It allows to query a large image archive by image examples alternated by a textual description, enriching the descriptive power over unimodal queries, either visual or textual. Various attributes can be modified by the textual part, such as shape, color, or context. A novel method fusing image-to-image and text-to-image similarity is introduced. We demonstrate that a vision-language model possesses sufficient descriptive power and no further learning step or training data are necessary. We present a new evaluation benchmark focused on color, context, density, existence, quantity, and shape modifications. Our work not only sets the state-of-the-art for this task, but also serves as a foundational step in addressing a gap in the field of remote sensing image retrieval. Code at: https://github.com/billpsomas/rscir.

This work addresses scaling up the sketch classification task into a large number of categories. Collecting sketches for training is a slow and tedious process that has so far precluded any attempts to large-scale sketch recognition. We overcome the lack of training sketch data by exploiting labeled collections of natural images that are easier to obtain. To bridge the domain gap we present a novel augmentation technique that is tailored to the task of learning sketch recognition from a training set of natural images. Randomization is introduced in the parameters of edge detection and edge selection. Natural images are translated to a pseudo-novel domain called "randomized Binary Thin Edges" (rBTE), which is used as a training domain instead of natural images. The ability to scale up is demonstrated by training CNN-based sketch recognition of more than 2.5 times larger number of categories than used previously. For this purpose, a dataset of natural images from 874 categories is constructed by combining a number of popular computer vision datasets. The categories are selected to be suitable for sketch recognition. To estimate the performance, a subset of 393 categories with sketches is also collected.