# 3rd Place: A Global and Local Dual Retrieval Solution to Facebook AI Image Similarity Challenge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02373 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02373/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [Google Landmarks Dataset v2 -- A Large-Scale Benchmark for Instance-Level Recognition and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01804/) (2020)
- [Efficient Self-supervised Vision Transformers for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09785/) (2021)
- [Cross-Batch Memory for Embedding Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06798/) (2019)
- [The 2021 Image Similarity Dataset and Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09672/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Results and findings of the 2021 Image Similarity Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04007/) (2022)
- [A Benchmark and Asymmetrical-Similarity Learning for Practical Image Copy Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12358/) (2022)
- [Vector search with small radiuses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10746/) (2024)
- [Tracing Copied Pixels and Regularizing Patch Affinity in Copy Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17484/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As a basic task of computer vision, image similarity retrieval is facing the challenge of large-scale data and image copy attacks. This paper presents our 3rd place solution to the matching track of Image Similarity Challenge (ISC) 2021 organized by Facebook AI. We propose a multi-branch retrieval method of combining global descriptors and local descriptors to cover all attack cases. Specifically, we attempt many strategies to optimize global descriptors, including abundant data augmentations, self-supervised learning with a single Transformer model, overlay detection preprocessing. Moreover, we introduce the robust SIFT feature and GPU Faiss for local retrieval which makes up for the shortcomings of the global retrieval. Finally, KNN-matching algorithm is used to judge the match and merge scores. We show some ablation experiments of our method, which reveals the complementary advantages of global and local features.