Due to its fast retrieval and storage efficiency capabilities, hashing has been widely used in nearest neighbor retrieval tasks. By using deep learning-based techniques, hashing can outperform non-learning-based hashing technique in many applications. However, we argue that the current deep learning-based hashing methods ignore some critical problems (e.g., the learned hash codes are not discriminative due to the hashing methods being unable to discover rich semantic information and the training strategy having difficulty optimizing the discrete binary codes). In this paper, we propose a novel image hashing method, termed as asymmetric deep semantic quantization (ADSQ). The ADSQ is implemented using three stream frameworks, which consist of one LabelNet and two ImgNets. The LabelNet leverages the power of three fully-connected layers, which are used to capture rich semantic information between image pairs. For the two ImgNets, they each adopt the same convolutional neural network structure but with different weights (i.e., asymmetric convolutional neural networks). The two ImgNets are used to generate discriminative compact hash codes. Specifically, the function of the LabelNet is to capture rich semantic information that is used to guide the two ImgNets in minimizing the gap between the real-continuous features and the discrete binary codes. Furthermore, the ADSQ can utilize the most critical semantic information to guide the feature learning process and consider the consistency of the common semantic space and Hamming space. The experimental results on three benchmarks (i.e., CIFAR-10, NUS-WIDE, and ImageNet) demonstrate that the proposed ADSQ can outperform current state-of-the-art methods.
By representing images as binary codes and taking advantage of fast query retrieval, the use of hashing techniques in image retrieval has attracted considerable attention. Wang @cite_1 have provided a comprehensive literature survey that covers the most important methods and latest advances in information retrieval.
@cite_1
2464915613 2951692027 2789854678 2767123230
In this paper, we present a new hashing method to learn compact binary codes for highly efficient image retrieval on large-scale datasets. While the complex image appearance variations still pose a great challenge to reliable retrieval, in light of the recent progress of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in learning robust image representation on various vision tasks, this paper proposes a novel Deep Supervised Hashing (DSH) method to learn compact similarity-preserving binary code for the huge body of image data. Specifically, we devise a CNN architecture that takes pairs of images (similar dissimilar) as training inputs and encourages the output of each image to approximate discrete values (e.g. +1 -1). To this end, a loss function is elaborately designed to maximize the discriminability of the output space by encoding the supervised information from the input image pairs, and simultaneously imposing regularization on the real-valued outputs to approximate the desired discrete values. For image retrieval, new-coming query images can be easily encoded by propagating through the network and then quantizing the network outputs to binary codes representation. Extensive experiments on two large scale datasets CIFAR-10 and NUS-WIDE show the promising performance of our method compared with the state-of-the-arts. An attractive approach for fast search in image databases is binary hashing, where each high-dimensional, real-valued image is mapped onto a low-dimensional, binary vector and the search is done in this binary space. Finding the optimal hash function is difficult because it involves binary constraints, and most approaches approximate the optimization by relaxing the constraints and then binarizing the result. Here, we focus on the binary autoencoder model, which seeks to reconstruct an image from the binary code produced by the hash function. We show that the optimization can be simplified with the method of auxiliary coordinates. This reformulates the optimization as alternating two easier steps: one that learns the encoder and decoder separately, and one that optimizes the code for each image. Image retrieval experiments, using precision recall and a measure of code utilization, show the resulting hash function outperforms or is competitive with state-of-the-art methods for binary hashing. Binary vector embeddings enable fast nearest neighbor retrieval in large databases of high-dimensional objects, and play an important role in many practical applications, such as image and video retrieval. We study the problem of learning binary vector embeddings under a supervised setting, also known as hashing. We propose a novel supervised hashing method based on optimizing an information-theoretic quantity, mutual information. We show that optimizing mutual information can reduce ambiguity in the induced neighborhood structure in learned Hamming space, which is essential in obtaining high retrieval performance. To this end, we optimize mutual information in deep neural networks with minibatch stochastic gradient descent, with a formulation that maximally and efficiently utilizes available supervision. Experiments on four image retrieval benchmarks, including ImageNet, confirm the effectiveness of our method in learning high-quality binary embeddings for nearest neighbor retrieval. Application of the hashing method to large-scale image retrieval has drawn much attention because of the high efficiency and favorable accuracy of the method. Its related research generally involves two basic problems: similarity-preserving projection and information-preserving quantization. Most previous works focused on learning projection approaches, while the importance of quantization strategies was ignored. Although several hashing quantization models have been recently proposed to improve retrieval performance by assigning multiple bits to projected directions, these models still suffer from suboptimal results, as the critical information loss that occurs in the quantization procedure is not considered. In this paper, to construct an effective quantization model, we utilize rate-distortion theory in the hashing quantization procedure and minimize the distortion to reduce the information loss. Furthermore, combining principal component analysis with our quantization strategy, we present a quantization-based hashing method named distortion minimization hashing. Extensive experiments involving one synthetic data set and three image data sets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed methods over several quantization techniques and state-of-the-art hashing methods.