Generalized Image Embedding for Multi-Domain Image Retrieval

Boao Xiao, Siyuan Wu, Xin He, Wanchun Dou

Abstract: Image embedding, being a fundamental task in computer vision, plays a crucial role in various downstream tasks such as image retrieval. Widely adopted in e-commerce and social media collaboration, image retrieval benefits greatly from representations learned by the embedding model. However, conventional embedding models are often trained on a single domain, leading to inadequate performance in the multi-domain scenario. To address this challenge, we introduce a generalized image embedding model designed for multi-domain image retrieval. The proposed method employs a contrastively learned Vision Transformer and a carefully crafted training scheme to enhance domain generalization capability. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results, conducted on a large-scale, real-world multi-domain image retrieval dataset, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over existing embedding models in terms of both accuracy and domain generalization capability.