Deep Learning-Based Image Retrieval System with Clustering on Attention-Based Representations

In the modern era of digital photography and advent of smartphones, millions of images are generated every day and they represent precious moments and events of our lives. As we continue to add images to our digital storehouse, the management and access handling of the images becomes a daunting task, and we lose track unless properly managed. We are in essential need of a tool that can fetch images based on a word or a description. In this paper, we try to build a solution that retrieves relevant images from a pool, based on the description by looking at the content of the image. The model is based on deep neural network architecture and attending to relevant parts of the image. The algorithm takes a sentence or word as input and obtains the top images which are relevant to the caption. We obtain the representation of the sentence and image in a higher dimension, which enables us to compare the two and find the similarity level of both to decide on the relevance. We have conducted various experiments to improve the representation of the image and the caption obtained in the latent space for better correlation, for, e.g., use of bidirectional sequence models for better textual representation, use of various baseline convolution-based stacks for better image representation. We have also tried to incorporate the self-attention mechanism to focus on only the relevant parts of the image and the sentence, thereby enhancing the correlation between the two spaces. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.