Cross-modal similarity search is a problem about designing a search system supporting querying across content modalities, e.g., using an image to search for texts or using a text to search for images. This paper presents a compact coding solution for efficient search, with a focus on the quantization approach which has already shown the superior performance over the hashing solutions in the single-modal similarity search. We propose a cross-modal quantization approach, which is among the early attempts to introduce quantization into cross-modal search. The major contribution lies in jointly learning the quantizers for both modalities through aligning the quantized representations for each pair of image and text belonging to a document. In addition, our approach simultaneously learns the common space for both modalities in which quantization is conducted to enable efficient and effective search using the Euclidean distance computed in the common space with fast distance table lookup. Experimental results compared with several competitive algorithms over three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
Efficient similarity retrieval from large-scale multimodal database is pervasive in current search systems with the big data tidal wave. To support queries across content modalities, the system should enable cross-modal correlation and computation-efficient indexing. While hashing methods have shown great potential in approaching this goal, current attempts generally failed to learn isomorphic hash codes in a seamless scheme, that is, they embed multiple modalities into a continuous isomorphic space and then threshold embeddings into binary codes, which incurred substantial loss of search quality. In this paper, we establish seamless multimodal hashing by proposing a novel Compositional Correlation Quantization (CCQ) model. Specifically, CCQ jointly finds correlation-maximal mappings that transform different modalities into an isomorphic latent space, and learns compositional quantizers that quantize the isomorphic latent features into compact binary codes. An optimization framework is developed to preserve both intra-modal similarity and inter-modal correlation while minimizing both reconstruction and quantization errors, which can be trained from both paired and unpaired data in linear time. A comprehensive set of experiments clearly show the superior effectiveness and efficiency of CCQ against the state-of-the-art techniques on both unimodal and cross-modal search tasks. Cross-modal hashing is designed to facilitate fast search across domains. In this work, we present a cross-modal hashing approach, called quantized correlation hashing (QCH), which takes into consideration the quantization loss over domains and the relation between domains. Unlike previous approaches that separate the optimization of the quantizer independent of maximization of domain correlation, our approach simultaneously optimizes both processes. The underlying relation between the domains that describes the same objects is established via maximizing the correlation between the hash codes across the domains. The resulting multi-modal objective function is transformed to a unimodal formalization, which is optimized through an alternative procedure. Experimental results on three real world datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art multi-modal hashing methods.