Similarity-preserving hashing is a commonly used method for nearest neighbor search in large-scale image retrieval. For image retrieval, deep-network-based hashing methods are appealing, since they can simultaneously learn effective image representations and compact hash codes. This paper focuses on deep-network-based hashing for multi-label images, each of which may contain objects of multiple categories. In most existing hashing methods, each image is represented by one piece of hash code, which is referred to as semantic hashing. This setting may be suboptimal for multi-label image retrieval. To solve this problem, we propose a deep architecture that learns instance-aware image representations for multi-label image data, which are organized in multiple groups, with each group containing the features for one category. The instance-aware representations not only bring advantages to semantic hashing but also can be used in category-aware hashing, in which an image is represented by multiple pieces of hash codes and each piece of code corresponds to a category. Extensive evaluations conducted on several benchmark data sets demonstrate that for both the semantic hashing and the category-aware hashing, the proposed method shows substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised hashing methods.
Hashing is a popular approximate nearest neighbor search approach for large-scale image retrieval. Supervised hashing, which incorporates similarity dissimilarity information on entity pairs to improve the quality of hashing function learning, has recently received increasing attention. However, in the existing supervised hashing methods for images, an input image is usually encoded by a vector of handcrafted visual features. Such hand-crafted feature vectors do not necessarily preserve the accurate semantic similarities of images pairs, which may often degrade the performance of hashing function learning. In this paper, we propose a supervised hashing method for image retrieval, in which we automatically learn a good image representation tailored to hashing as well as a set of hash functions. The proposed method has two stages. In the first stage, given the pairwise similarity matrix S over training images, we propose a scalable coordinate descent method to decompose S into a product of HHT where H is a matrix with each of its rows being the approximate hash code associated to a training image. In the second stage, we propose to simultaneously learn a good feature representation for the input images as well as a set of hash functions, via a deep convolutional network tailored to the learned hash codes in H and optionally the discrete class labels of the images. Extensive empirical evaluations on three benchmark datasets with different kinds of images show that the proposed method has superior performance gains over several state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised hashing methods. Similarity-preserving hashing is a widely-used method for nearest neighbour search in large-scale image retrieval tasks. For most existing hashing methods, an image is first encoded as a vector of hand-engineering visual features, followed by another separate projection or quantization step that generates binary codes. However, such visual feature vectors may not be optimally compatible with the coding process, thus producing sub-optimal hashing codes. In this paper, we propose a deep architecture for supervised hashing, in which images are mapped into binary codes via carefully designed deep neural networks. The pipeline of the proposed deep architecture consists of three building blocks: 1) a sub-network with a stack of convolution layers to produce the effective intermediate image features; 2) a divide-and-encode module to divide the intermediate image features into multiple branches, each encoded into one hash bit; and 3) a triplet ranking loss designed to characterize that one image is more similar to the second image than to the third one. Extensive evaluations on several benchmark image datasets show that the proposed simultaneous feature learning and hash coding pipeline brings substantial improvements over other state-of-the-art supervised or unsupervised hashing methods. Hashing is an important method for performing efficient similarity search. With the explosive growth of multimodal data, how to learn hashing-based compact representations for multimodal data becomes highly non-trivial. Compared with shallow-structured models, deep models present superiority in capturing multimodal correlations due to their high nonlinearity. However, in order to make the learned representation more accurate and compact, how to reduce the redundant information lying in the multimodal representations and incorporate different complexities of different modalities in the deep models is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel deep multimodal hashing method, namely Deep Multimodal Hashing with Orthogonal Regularization (DMHOR), which fully exploits intra-modality and inter-modality correlations. In particular, to reduce redundant information, we impose orthogonal regularizer on the weighting matrices of the model, and theoretically prove that the learned representation is guaranteed to be approximately orthogonal. Moreover, we find that a better representation can be attained with different numbers of layers for different modalities, due to their different complexities. Comprehensive experiments on WIKI and NUS-WIDE, demonstrate a substantial gain of DMHOR compared with state-of-the-art methods. With the rapid growth of web images, hashing has received increasing interests in large scale image retrieval. Research efforts have been devoted to learning compact binary codes that preserve semantic similarity based on labels. However, most of these hashing methods are designed to handle simple binary similarity. The complex multi-level semantic structure of images associated with multiple labels have not yet been well explored. Here we propose a deep semantic ranking based method for learning hash functions that preserve multilevel semantic similarity between multi-label images. In our approach, deep convolutional neural network is incorporated into hash functions to jointly learn feature representations and mappings from them to hash codes, which avoids the limitation of semantic representation power of hand-crafted features. Meanwhile, a ranking list that encodes the multilevel similarity information is employed to guide the learning of such deep hash functions. An effective scheme based on surrogate loss is used to solve the intractable optimization problem of nonsmooth and multivariate ranking measures involved in the learning procedure. Experimental results show the superiority of our proposed approach over several state-of-the-art hashing methods in term of ranking evaluation metrics when tested on multi-label image datasets. The Internet contains billions of images, freely available online. Methods for efficiently searching this incredibly rich resource are vital for a large number of applications. These include object recognition, computer graphics, personal photo collections, online image search tools. In this paper, our goal is to develop efficient image search and scene matching techniques that are not only fast, but also require very little memory, enabling their use on standard hardware or even on handheld devices. Our approach uses recently developed machine learning techniques to convert the Gist descriptor (a real valued vector that describes orientation energies at different scales and orientations within an image) to a compact binary code, with a few hundred bits per image. Using our scheme, it is possible to perform real-time searches with millions from the Internet using a single large PC and obtain recognition results comparable to the full descriptor. Using our codes on high quality labeled images from the LabelMe database gives surprisingly powerful recognition results using simple nearest neighbor techniques. Approximate nearest neighbor search is an efficient strategy for large-scale image retrieval. Encouraged by the recent advances in convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we propose an effective deep learning framework to generate binary hash codes for fast image retrieval. Our idea is that when the data labels are available, binary codes can be learned by employing a hidden layer for representing the latent concepts that dominate the class labels. The utilization of the CNN also allows for learning image representations. Unlike other supervised methods that require pair-wised inputs for binary code learning, our method learns hash codes and image representations in a point-wised manner, making it suitable for large-scale datasets. Experimental results show that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art hashing algorithms on the CIFAR-10 and MNIST datasets. We further demonstrate its scalability and efficacy on a large-scale dataset of 1 million clothing images.