Hashing for Similarity Search: A Survey

Similarity search (nearest neighbor search) is a problem of pursuing the data items whose distances to a query item are the smallest from a large database. Various methods have been developed to address this problem, and recently a lot of efforts have been devoted to approximate search. In this paper, we present a survey on one of the main solutions, hashing, which has been widely studied since the pioneering work locality sensitive hashing. We divide the hashing algorithms two main categories: locality sensitive hashing, which designs hash functions without exploring the data distribution and learning to hash, which learns hash functions according the data distribution, and review them from various aspects, including hash function design and distance measure and search scheme in the hash coding space

Unsupervised Hashing via Similarity Distribution Calibration

Existing unsupervised hashing methods typically adopt a feature similarity preservation paradigm. As a result, they overlook the intrinsic similarity capacity discrepancy between the continuous feature and discrete hash code spaces. Specifically, since the feature similarity distribution is intrinsically biased (e.g., moderately positive similarity scores on negative pairs), the hash code similarities of positive and negative pairs often become inseparable (i.e., the similarity collapse problem). To solve this problem, in this paper a novel Similarity Distribution Calibration (SDC) method is introduced. Instead of matching individual pairwise similarity scores, SDC aligns the hash code similarity distribution towards a calibration distribution (e.g., beta distribution) with sufficient spread across the entire similarity capacity/range, to alleviate the similarity collapse problem. Extensive experiments show that our SDC outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives on both coarse category-level and instance-level image retrieval tasks, often by a large margin. Code is available at https://github.com/kamwoh/sdc

Deep Supervised Hashing using Symmetric Relative Entropy

By virtue of their simplicity and efficiency, hashing algorithms have achieved significant success on large-scale approximate nearest neighbor search. Recently, many deep neural network based hashing methods have been proposed to improve the search accuracy by simultaneously learning both the feature representation and the binary hash functions. Most deep hashing methods depend on supervised semantic label information for preserving the distance or similarity between local structures, which unfortunately ignores the global distribution of the learned hash codes. We propose a novel deep supervised hashing method that aims to minimize the information loss generated during the embedding process. Specifically, the information loss is measured by the Jensen-Shannon divergence to ensure that compact hash codes have a similar distribution with those from the original images. Experimental results show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches on two benchmark datasets