SADIH: Semantic-Aware DIscrete Hashing

Due to its low storage cost and fast query speed, hashing has been recognized to accomplish similarity search in large-scale multimedia retrieval applications. Particularly supervised hashing has recently received considerable research attention by leveraging the label information to preserve the pairwise similarities of data points in the Hamming space. However, there still remain two crucial bottlenecks: 1) the learning process of the full pairwise similarity preservation is computationally unaffordable and unscalable to deal with big data; 2) the available category information of data are not well-explored to learn discriminative hash functions. To overcome these challenges, we propose a unified Semantic-Aware DIscrete Hashing (SADIH) framework, which aims to directly embed the transformed semantic information into the asymmetric similarity approximation and discriminative hashing function learning. Specifically, a semantic-aware latent embedding is introduced to asymmetrically preserve the full pairwise similarities while skillfully handle the cumbersome n times n pairwise similarity matrix. Meanwhile, a semantic-aware autoencoder is developed to jointly preserve the data structures in the discriminative latent semantic space and perform data reconstruction. Moreover, an efficient alternating optimization algorithm is proposed to solve the resulting discrete optimization problem. Extensive experimental results on multiple large-scale datasets demonstrate that our SADIH can clearly outperform the state-of-the-art baselines with the additional benefit of lower computational costs.Comment: Accepted by The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19

Zero-Shot Hashing via Transferring Supervised Knowledge

Hashing has shown its efficiency and effectiveness in facilitating large-scale multimedia applications. Supervised knowledge e.g. semantic labels or pair-wise relationship) associated to data is capable of significantly improving the quality of hash codes and hash functions. However, confronted with the rapid growth of newly-emerging concepts and multimedia data on the Web, existing supervised hashing approaches may easily suffer from the scarcity and validity of supervised information due to the expensive cost of manual labelling. In this paper, we propose a novel hashing scheme, termed \emph{zero-shot hashing} (ZSH), which compresses images of "unseen" categories to binary codes with hash functions learned from limited training data of "seen" categories. Specifically, we project independent data labels i.e. 0/1-form label vectors) into semantic embedding space, where semantic relationships among all the labels can be precisely characterized and thus seen supervised knowledge can be transferred to unseen classes. Moreover, in order to cope with the semantic shift problem, we rotate the embedded space to more suitably align the embedded semantics with the low-level visual feature space, thereby alleviating the influence of semantic gap. In the meantime, to exert positive effects on learning high-quality hash functions, we further propose to preserve local structural property and discrete nature in binary codes. Besides, we develop an efficient alternating algorithm to solve the ZSH model. Extensive experiments conducted on various real-life datasets show the superior zero-shot image retrieval performance of ZSH as compared to several state-of-the-art hashing methods.Comment: 11 page