Hashing is widely applied to large-scale image retrieval due to the storage and retrieval efficiency. Existing work on deep hashing assumes that the database in the target domain is identically distributed with the training set in the source domain. This paper relaxes this assumption to a transfer retrieval setting, which allows the database and the training set to come from different but relevant domains. However, the transfer retrieval setting will introduce two technical difficulties: first, the hash model trained on the source domain cannot work well on the target domain due to the large distribution gap; second, the domain gap makes it difficult to concentrate the database points to be within a small Hamming ball. As a consequence, transfer retrieval performance within Hamming Radius 2 degrades significantly in existing hashing methods. This paper presents Transfer Adversarial Hashing (TAH), a new hybrid deep architecture that incorporates a pairwise @math -distribution cross-entropy loss to learn concentrated hash codes and an adversarial network to align the data distributions between the source and target domains. TAH can generate compact transfer hash codes for efficient image retrieval on both source and target domains. Comprehensive experiments validate that TAH yields state of the art Hamming space retrieval performance on standard datasets.
Similarity search (nearest neighbor search) is a problem of pursuing the data items whose distances to a query item are the smallest from a large database. Various methods have been developed to address this problem, and recently a lot of efforts have been devoted to approximate search. In this paper, we present a survey on one of the main solutions, hashing, which has been widely studied since the pioneering work locality sensitive hashing. We divide the hashing algorithms two main categories: locality sensitive hashing, which designs hash functions without exploring the data distribution and learning to hash, which learns hash functions according the data distribution, and review them from various aspects, including hash function design and distance measure and search scheme in the hash coding space.