Cycle-Consistent Deep Generative Hashing for Cross-Modal Retrieval

In this paper, we propose a novel deep generative approach to cross-modal retrieval to learn hash functions in the absence of paired training samples through the cycle consistency loss. Our proposed approach employs adversarial training scheme to lean a couple of hash functions enabling translation between modalities while assuming the underlying semantic relationship. To induce the hash codes with semantics to the input-output pair, cycle consistency loss is further proposed upon the adversarial training to strengthen the correlations between inputs and corresponding outputs. Our approach is generative to learn hash functions such that the learned hash codes can maximally correlate each input-output correspondence, meanwhile can also regenerate the inputs so as to minimize the information loss. The learning to hash embedding is thus performed to jointly optimize the parameters of the hash functions across modalities as well as the associated generative models. Extensive experiments on a variety of large-scale cross-modal data sets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves better retrieval results than the state-of-the-arts.Comment: To appeared on IEEE Trans. Image Processing. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1703.10593 by other author

Deep Sketch Hashing: Fast Free-hand Sketch-Based Image Retrieval

Free-hand sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) is a specific cross-view retrieval task, in which queries are abstract and ambiguous sketches while the retrieval database is formed with natural images. Work in this area mainly focuses on extracting representative and shared features for sketches and natural images. However, these can neither cope well with the geometric distortion between sketches and images nor be feasible for large-scale SBIR due to the heavy continuous-valued distance computation. In this paper, we speed up SBIR by introducing a novel binary coding method, named \textbf{Deep Sketch Hashing} (DSH), where a semi-heterogeneous deep architecture is proposed and incorporated into an end-to-end binary coding framework. Specifically, three convolutional neural networks are utilized to encode free-hand sketches, natural images and, especially, the auxiliary sketch-tokens which are adopted as bridges to mitigate the sketch-image geometric distortion. The learned DSH codes can effectively capture the cross-view similarities as well as the intrinsic semantic correlations between different categories. To the best of our knowledge, DSH is the first hashing work specifically designed for category-level SBIR with an end-to-end deep architecture. The proposed DSH is comprehensively evaluated on two large-scale datasets of TU-Berlin Extension and Sketchy, and the experiments consistently show DSH's superior SBIR accuracies over several state-of-the-art methods, while achieving significantly reduced retrieval time and memory footprint.Comment: This paper will appear as a spotlight paper in CVPR201

Deep Binary Representation Learning for Single/Cross-Modal Data Retrieval

Data similarity search is widely regarded as a classic topic in the realms of computer vision, machine learning and data mining. Providing a certain query, the retrieval model sorts out the related candidates in the database according to their similarities, where representation learning methods and nearest-neighbour search apply. As matching data features in Hamming space is computationally cheaper than in Euclidean space, learning to hash and binary representations are generally appreciated in modern retrieval models. Recent research seeks solutions in deep learning to formulate the hash functions, showing great potential in retrieval performance. In this thesis, we gradually extend our research topics and contributions from unsupervised single-modal deep hashing to supervised cross-modal hashing _nally zero-shot hashing problems, addressing the following challenges in deep hashing. First of all, existing unsupervised deep hashing works are still not attaining leading retrieval performance compared with the shallow ones. To improve this, a novel unsupervised single-modal hashing model is proposed in this thesis, named Deep Variational Binaries (DVB). We introduce the popular conditional variational auto-encoders to formulate the encoding function. By minimizing the reconstruction error of the latent variables, the proposed model produces compact binary codes without training supervision. Experiments on benchmarked datasets show that our model outperform existing unsupervised hashing methods. The second problem is that current cross-modal hashing methods only consider holistic image representations and fail to model descriptive sentences, which is inappropriate to handle the rich semantics of informative cross-modal data for quality textual-visual search tasks. To handle this problem, we propose a supervised deep cross-modal hashing model called Textual-Visual Deep Binaries (TVDB). Region-based neural networks and recurrent neural networks are involved in the image encoding network in order to make e_ective use of visual information, while the text encoder is built using a convolutional neural network. We additionally introduce an e_cient in-batch optimization routine to train the network parameters. The proposed mode successfully outperforms state-of-the-art methods on large-scale datasets. Finally, existing hashing models fail when the categories of query data have never been seen during training. This scenario is further extended into a novel zero-shot cross-modal hashing task in this thesis, and a Zero-shot Sketch-Image Hashing (ZSIH) scheme is then proposed with graph convolution and stochastic neurons. Experiments show that the proposed ZSIH model signi_cantly outperforms existing hashing algorithms in the zero-shot retrieval task. Experiments suggest our proposed and novel hashing methods outperform state-of-the-art researches in single-modal and cross-modal data retrieval