Along with data on the web increasing dramatically, hashing is becoming more and more popular as a method of approximate nearest neighbor search. Previous supervised hashing methods utilized similarity dissimilarity matrix to get semantic information. But the matrix is not easy to construct for a new dataset. Rather than to reconstruct the matrix, we proposed a straightforward CNN-based hashing method, i.e. binarilizing the activations of a fully connected layer with threshold 0 and taking the binary result as hash codes. This method achieved the best performance on CIFAR-10 and was comparable with the state-of-the-art on MNIST. And our experiments on CIFAR-10 suggested that the signs of activations may carry more information than the relative values of activations between samples, and that the co-adaption between feature extractor and hash functions is important for hashing.
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. Hashing-based approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search in huge databases has become popular due to its computational and memory efficiency. The popular hashing methods, e.g., Locality Sensitive Hashing and Spectral Hashing, construct hash functions based on random or principal projections. The resulting hashes are either not very accurate or are inefficient. Moreover, these methods are designed for a given metric similarity. On the contrary, semantic similarity is usually given in terms of pairwise labels of samples. There exist supervised hashing methods that can handle such semantic similarity, but they are prone to overfitting when labeled data are small or noisy. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised hashing (SSH) framework that minimizes empirical error over the labeled set and an information theoretic regularizer over both labeled and unlabeled sets. Based on this framework, we present three different semi-supervised hashing methods, including orthogonal hashing, nonorthogonal hashing, and sequential hashing. Particularly, the sequential hashing method generates robust codes in which each hash function is designed to correct the errors made by the previous ones. We further show that the sequential learning paradigm can be extended to unsupervised domains where no labeled pairs are available. Extensive experiments on four large datasets (up to 80 million samples) demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed SSH methods over state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised hashing techniques.