This paper tackles the problem of large-scale image-based localization (IBL)
where the spatial location of a query image is determined by finding out the
most similar reference images in a large database. For solving this problem, a
critical task is to learn discriminative image representation that captures
informative information relevant for localization. We propose a novel
representation learning method having higher location-discriminating power. It
provides the following contributions: 1) we represent a place (location) as a
set of exemplar images depicting the same landmarks and aim to maximize
similarities among intra-place images while minimizing similarities among
inter-place images; 2) we model a similarity measure as a probability
distribution on L_2-metric distances between intra-place and inter-place image
representations; 3) we propose a new Stochastic Attraction and Repulsion
Embedding (SARE) loss function minimizing the KL divergence between the learned
and the actual probability distributions; 4) we give theoretical comparisons
between SARE, triplet ranking and contrastive losses. It provides insights into
why SARE is better by analyzing gradients. Our SARE loss is easy to implement
and pluggable to any CNN. Experiments show that our proposed method improves
the localization performance on standard benchmarks by a large margin.
Demonstrating the broad applicability of our method, we obtained the third
place out of 209 teams in the 2018 Google Landmark Retrieval Challenge. Our
code and model are available at this https URL

本文提出了一种创新的表征学习方法，其中的 Stochastic Attraction and Repulsion Embedding 损失函数通过最小化 KL 散度，最大化相似的内部表征并最小化不同场所之间表征的相似度，得到更高的定位鉴别力，进一步提高了标准基准上的定位性能。