Deep Feature Aggregation with Heat Diffusion for Image Retrieval

Image-level feature descriptors obtained from convolutional neural networks have shown powerful representation capabilities for image retrieval. In this paper, we present an unsupervised method to aggregate deep convolutional features into compact yet discriminative image vectors by simulating the dynamics of heat diffusion. A distinctive problem in image retrieval is that repetitive or bursty features tend to dominate feature representations, leading to less than ideal matches. We show that by considering each deep feature as a heat source, our method is able to avoiding over-representation of bursty features. We additionally provide a practical solution for the proposed aggregation method, which is further demonstrated in our experimental evaluation. Finally, we extensively evaluate the proposed approach with pre-trained and fine-tuned deep networks on common public benchmarks, and show superior performance compared to previous work.