The research on hashing techniques for visual data is gaining increased attention in recent years due to the need for compact representations supporting efficient search retrieval in large-scale databases such as online images. Among many possibilities, Mean Average Precision(mAP) has emerged as the dominant performance metric for hashing-based retrieval. One glaring shortcoming of mAP is its inability in balancing retrieval accuracy and utilization of hash codes: pushing a system to attain higher mAP will inevitably lead to poorer utilization of the hash codes. Poor utilization of the hash codes hinders good retrieval because of increased collision of samples in the hash space. This means that a model giving a higher mAP values does not necessarily do a better job in retrieval. In this paper, we introduce a new metric named Mean Local Group Average Precision (mLGAP) for better evaluation of the performance of hashing-based retrieval. The new metric provides a retrieval performance measure that also reconciles the utilization of hash codes, leading to a more practically meaningful performance metric than conventional ones like mAP. To this end, we start by mathematical analysis of the deficiencies of mAP for hashing-based retrieval. We then propose mLGAP and show why it is more appropriate for hashing-based retrieval. Experiments on image retrieval are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed metric.
Hashing techniques can be divided into two categories: data-independent methods, and data-dependent methods. One representative data-independent approach is Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) @cite_15 , which uses random projections to generate hash functions. LSH has been extended to several versions, such as Kernelized LSH @cite_16 and other variants @cite_17 @cite_20 . However, empirical results suggest that, LSH and other data-dependent approaches like @cite_13 usually require long bit length to maintain high precision and recall. This not only lowers the speed performance, but also increases space complexity. Hence data-dependent approaches are not deemed as the best option for large-scale problems like Internet-scale image retrieval.
@cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_20 @cite_17
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The nearestor near-neighbor query problems arise in a large variety of database applications, usually in the context of similarity searching. Of late, there has been increasing interest in building search index structures for performing similarity search over high-dimensional data, e.g., image databases, document collections, time-series databases, and genome databases. Unfortunately, all known techniques for solving this problem fall prey to the of dimensionality." That is, the data structures scale poorly with data dimensionality; in fact, if the number of dimensions exceeds 10 to 20, searching in k-d trees and related structures involves the inspection of a large fraction of the database, thereby doing no better than brute-force linear search. It has been suggested that since the selection of features and the choice of a distance metric in typical applications is rather heuristic, determining an approximate nearest neighbor should su ce for most practical purposes. In this paper, we examine a novel scheme for approximate similarity search based on hashing. The basic idea is to hash the points Supported by NAVY N00014-96-1-1221 grant and NSF Grant IIS-9811904. Supported by Stanford Graduate Fellowship and NSF NYI Award CCR-9357849. Supported by ARO MURI Grant DAAH04-96-1-0007, NSF Grant IIS-9811904, and NSF Young Investigator Award CCR9357849, with matching funds from IBM, Mitsubishi, Schlumberger Foundation, Shell Foundation, and Xerox Corporation. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 25th VLDB Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1999. from the database so as to ensure that the probability of collision is much higher for objects that are close to each other than for those that are far apart. We provide experimental evidence that our method gives signi cant improvement in running time over other methods for searching in highdimensional spaces based on hierarchical tree decomposition. Experimental results also indicate that our scheme scales well even for a relatively large number of dimensions (more than 50). Fast retrieval methods are critical for large-scale and data-driven vision applications. Recent work has explored ways to embed high-dimensional features or complex distance functions into a low-dimensional Hamming space where items can be efficiently searched. However, existing methods do not apply for high-dimensional kernelized data when the underlying feature embedding for the kernel is unknown. We show how to generalize locality-sensitive hashing to accommodate arbitrary kernel functions, making it possible to preserve the algorithm's sub-linear time similarity search guarantees for a wide class of useful similarity functions. Since a number of successful image-based kernels have unknown or incomputable embeddings, this is especially valuable for image retrieval tasks. We validate our technique on several large-scale datasets, and show that it enables accurate and fast performance for example-based object classification, feature matching, and content-based retrieval. We introduce a method that enables scalable similarity search for learned metrics. Given pairwise similarity and dissimilarity constraints between some examples, we learn a Mahalanobis distance function that captures the examples' underlying relationships well. To allow sublinear time similarity search under the learned metric, we show how to encode the learned metric parameterization into randomized locality-sensitive hash functions. We further formulate an indirect solution that enables metric learning and hashing for vector spaces whose high dimensionality makes it infeasible to learn an explicit transformation over the feature dimensions. We demonstrate the approach applied to a variety of image data sets, as well as a systems data set. The learned metrics improve accuracy relative to commonly used metric baselines, while our hashing construction enables efficient indexing with learned distances and very large databases. We present a novel Locality-Sensitive Hashing scheme for the Approximate Nearest Neighbor Problem under lp norm, based on p-stable distributions.Our scheme improves the running time of the earlier algorithm for the case of the lp norm. It also yields the first known provably efficient approximate NN algorithm for the case p<1. We also show that the algorithm finds the exact near neigbhor in O(log n) time for data satisfying certain "bounded growth" condition.Unlike earlier schemes, our LSH scheme works directly on points in the Euclidean space without embeddings. Consequently, the resulting query time bound is free of large factors and is simple and easy to implement. Our experiments (on synthetic data sets) show that the our data structure is up to 40 times faster than kd-tree.