Relational Self-supervised Distillation with Compact Descriptors for Image Copy Detection

Abstract: Image copy detection is the task of detecting edited copies of any image within a reference database. While previous approaches have shown remarkable progress, the large size of their networks and descriptors remains a disadvantage, complicating their practical application. In this paper, we propose a novel method that achieves competitive performance by using a lightweight network and compact descriptors. By utilizing relational self-supervised distillation to transfer knowledge from a large network to a small network, we enable the training of lightweight networks with smaller descriptor sizes. We introduce relational self-supervised distillation for flexible representation in a smaller feature space and apply contrastive learning with a hard negative loss to prevent dimensional collapse. For the DISC2021 benchmark, ResNet-50 and EfficientNet-B0 are used as the teacher and student models, respectively, with micro average precision improving by 5.0\%/4.9\%/5.9\% for 64/128/256 descriptor sizes compared to the baseline method. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/juntae9926/RDCD}{https://github.com/juntae9926/RDCD}.