  Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a very powerful approach to extract
discriminative local descriptors for effective image search. Recent work adopts
fine-tuned strategies to further improve the discriminative power of the
descriptors. Taking a different approach, in this paper, we propose a novel
framework to achieve competitive retrieval performance. Firstly, we propose
various masking schemes, namely SIFT-mask, SUM-mask, and MAX-mask, to select a
representative subset of local convolutional features and remove a large number
of redundant features. We demonstrate that this can effectively address the
burstiness issue and improve retrieval accuracy. Secondly, we propose to employ
recent embedding and aggregating methods to further enhance feature
discriminability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework
achieves state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy.
