Image-Text Pre-Training for Logo Recognition
This work addresses the challenge of logo recognition for applications like brand monitoring and retrieval, offering incremental improvements over existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of open-set logo recognition by improving the matching model's performance through image-text pre-training and an enhanced metric learning loss, achieving significant recall@1 improvements such as 98.6% on a composite dataset and up to 6.5% on specific datasets.
Open-set logo recognition is commonly solved by first detecting possible logo regions and then matching the detected parts against an ever-evolving dataset of cropped logo images. The matching model, a metric learning problem, is especially challenging for logo recognition due to the mixture of text and symbols in logos. We propose two novel contributions to improve the matching model's performance: (a) using image-text paired samples for pre-training, and (b) an improved metric learning loss function. A standard paradigm of fine-tuning ImageNet pre-trained models fails to discover the text sensitivity necessary to solve the matching problem effectively. This work demonstrates the importance of pre-training on image-text pairs, which significantly improves the performance of a visual embedder trained for the logo retrieval task, especially for more text-dominant classes. We construct a composite public logo dataset combining LogoDet3K, OpenLogo, and FlickrLogos-47 deemed OpenLogoDet3K47. We show that the same vision backbone pre-trained on image-text data, when fine-tuned on OpenLogoDet3K47, achieves $98.6\%$ recall@1, significantly improving performance over pre-training on Imagenet1K ($97.6\%$). We generalize the ProxyNCA++ loss function to propose ProxyNCAHN++ which incorporates class-specific hard negative images. The proposed method sets new state-of-the-art on five public logo datasets considered, with a $3.5\%$ zero-shot recall@1 improvement on LogoDet3K test, $4\%$ on OpenLogo, $6.5\%$ on FlickrLogos-47, $6.2\%$ on Logos In The Wild, and $0.6\%$ on BelgaLogo.