A Survey on Learning to Hash

Nearest neighbor search is a problem of finding the data points from the database such that the distances from them to the query point are the smallest. Learning to hash is one of the major solutions to this problem and has been widely studied recently. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the learning to hash algorithms, categorize them according to the manners of preserving the similarities into: pairwise similarity preserving, multiwise similarity preserving, implicit similarity preserving, as well as quantization, and discuss their relations. We separate quantization from pairwise similarity preserving as the objective function is very different though quantization, as we show, can be derived from preserving the pairwise similarities. In addition, we present the evaluation protocols, and the general performance analysis, and point out that the quantization algorithms perform superiorly in terms of search accuracy, search time cost, and space cost. Finally, we introduce a few emerging topics.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions On Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI

SSDH: Semi-supervised Deep Hashing for Large Scale Image Retrieval

Hashing methods have been widely used for efficient similarity retrieval on large scale image database. Traditional hashing methods learn hash functions to generate binary codes from hand-crafted features, which achieve limited accuracy since the hand-crafted features cannot optimally represent the image content and preserve the semantic similarity. Recently, several deep hashing methods have shown better performance because the deep architectures generate more discriminative feature representations. However, these deep hashing methods are mainly designed for supervised scenarios, which only exploit the semantic similarity information, but ignore the underlying data structures. In this paper, we propose the semi-supervised deep hashing (SSDH) approach, to perform more effective hash function learning by simultaneously preserving semantic similarity and underlying data structures. The main contributions are as follows: (1) We propose a semi-supervised loss to jointly minimize the empirical error on labeled data, as well as the embedding error on both labeled and unlabeled data, which can preserve the semantic similarity and capture the meaningful neighbors on the underlying data structures for effective hashing. (2) A semi-supervised deep hashing network is designed to extensively exploit both labeled and unlabeled data, in which we propose an online graph construction method to benefit from the evolving deep features during training to better capture semantic neighbors. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed deep network is the first deep hashing method that can perform hash code learning and feature learning simultaneously in a semi-supervised fashion. Experimental results on 5 widely-used datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art hashing methods.Comment: 14 pages, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technolog

Learning to Hash for Indexing Big Data - A Survey

The explosive growth in big data has attracted much attention in designing efficient indexing and search methods recently. In many critical applications such as large-scale search and pattern matching, finding the nearest neighbors to a query is a fundamental research problem. However, the straightforward solution using exhaustive comparison is infeasible due to the prohibitive computational complexity and memory requirement. In response, Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search based on hashing techniques has become popular due to its promising performance in both efficiency and accuracy. Prior randomized hashing methods, e.g., Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH), explore data-independent hash functions with random projections or permutations. Although having elegant theoretic guarantees on the search quality in certain metric spaces, performance of randomized hashing has been shown insufficient in many real-world applications. As a remedy, new approaches incorporating data-driven learning methods in development of advanced hash functions have emerged. Such learning to hash methods exploit information such as data distributions or class labels when optimizing the hash codes or functions. Importantly, the learned hash codes are able to preserve the proximity of neighboring data in the original feature spaces in the hash code spaces. The goal of this paper is to provide readers with systematic understanding of insights, pros and cons of the emerging techniques. We provide a comprehensive survey of the learning to hash framework and representative techniques of various types, including unsupervised, semi-supervised, and supervised. In addition, we also summarize recent hashing approaches utilizing the deep learning models. Finally, we discuss the future direction and trends of research in this area

Improved Search in Hamming Space using Deep Multi-Index Hashing

Similarity-preserving hashing is a widely-used method for nearest neighbour search in large-scale image retrieval tasks. There has been considerable research on generating efficient image representation via the deep-network-based hashing methods. However, the issue of efficient searching in the deep representation space remains largely unsolved. To this end, we propose a simple yet efficient deep-network-based multi-index hashing method for simultaneously learning the powerful image representation and the efficient searching. To achieve these two goals, we introduce the multi-index hashing (MIH) mechanism into the proposed deep architecture, which divides the binary codes into multiple substrings. Due to the non-uniformly distributed codes will result in inefficiency searching, we add the two balanced constraints at feature-level and instance-level, respectively. Extensive evaluations on several benchmark image retrieval datasets show that the learned balanced binary codes bring dramatic speedups and achieve comparable performance over the existing baselines

Hashing with Mutual Information

Binary vector embeddings enable fast nearest neighbor retrieval in large databases of high-dimensional objects, and play an important role in many practical applications, such as image and video retrieval. We study the problem of learning binary vector embeddings under a supervised setting, also known as hashing. We propose a novel supervised hashing method based on optimizing an information-theoretic quantity: mutual information. We show that optimizing mutual information can reduce ambiguity in the induced neighborhood structure in the learned Hamming space, which is essential in obtaining high retrieval performance. To this end, we optimize mutual information in deep neural networks with minibatch stochastic gradient descent, with a formulation that maximally and efficiently utilizes available supervision. Experiments on four image retrieval benchmarks, including ImageNet, confirm the effectiveness of our method in learning high-quality binary embeddings for nearest neighbor retrieval

Deep Policy Hashing Network with Listwise Supervision

Deep-networks-based hashing has become a leading approach for large-scale image retrieval, which learns a similarity-preserving network to map similar images to nearby hash codes. The pairwise and triplet losses are two widely used similarity preserving manners for deep hashing. These manners ignore the fact that hashing is a prediction task on the list of binary codes. However, learning deep hashing with listwise supervision is challenging in 1) how to obtain the rank list of whole training set when the batch size of the deep network is always small and 2) how to utilize the listwise supervision. In this paper, we present a novel deep policy hashing architecture with two systems are learned in parallel: a query network and a shared and slowly changing database network. The following three steps are repeated until convergence: 1) the database network encodes all training samples into binary codes to obtain a whole rank list, 2) the query network is trained based on policy learning to maximize a reward that indicates the performance of the whole ranking list of binary codes, e.g., mean average precision (MAP), and 3) the database network is updated as the query network. Extensive evaluations on several benchmark datasets show that the proposed method brings substantial improvements over state-of-the-art hashing methods.Comment: 8 pages, accepted by ACM ICM

Transductive Zero-Shot Hashing via Coarse-to-Fine Similarity Mining

Zero-shot Hashing (ZSH) is to learn hashing models for novel/target classes without training data, which is an important and challenging problem. Most existing ZSH approaches exploit transfer learning via an intermediate shared semantic representations between the seen/source classes and novel/target classes. However, due to having disjoint, the hash functions learned from the source dataset are biased when applied directly to the target classes. In this paper, we study the transductive ZSH, i.e., we have unlabeled data for novel classes. We put forward a simple yet efficient joint learning approach via coarse-to-fine similarity mining which transfers knowledges from source data to target data. It mainly consists of two building blocks in the proposed deep architecture: 1) a shared two-streams network, which the first stream operates on the source data and the second stream operates on the unlabeled data, to learn the effective common image representations, and 2) a coarse-to-fine module, which begins with finding the most representative images from target classes and then further detect similarities among these images, to transfer the similarities of the source data to the target data in a greedy fashion. Extensive evaluation results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed hashing method achieves significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods

Feature Learning based Deep Supervised Hashing with Pairwise Labels

Recent years have witnessed wide application of hashing for large-scale image retrieval. However, most existing hashing methods are based on hand-crafted features which might not be optimally compatible with the hashing procedure. Recently, deep hashing methods have been proposed to perform simultaneous feature learning and hash-code learning with deep neural networks, which have shown better performance than traditional hashing methods with hand-crafted features. Most of these deep hashing methods are supervised whose supervised information is given with triplet labels. For another common application scenario with pairwise labels, there have not existed methods for simultaneous feature learning and hash-code learning. In this paper, we propose a novel deep hashing method, called deep pairwise-supervised hashing(DPSH), to perform simultaneous feature learning and hash-code learning for applications with pairwise labels. Experiments on real datasets show that our DPSH method can outperform other methods to achieve the state-of-the-art performance in image retrieval applications.Comment: IJCAI 201

A Comprehensive Survey on Cross-modal Retrieval

In recent years, cross-modal retrieval has drawn much attention due to the rapid growth of multimodal data. It takes one type of data as the query to retrieve relevant data of another type. For example, a user can use a text to retrieve relevant pictures or videos. Since the query and its retrieved results can be of different modalities, how to measure the content similarity between different modalities of data remains a challenge. Various methods have been proposed to deal with such a problem. In this paper, we first review a number of representative methods for cross-modal retrieval and classify them into two main groups: 1) real-valued representation learning, and 2) binary representation learning. Real-valued representation learning methods aim to learn real-valued common representations for different modalities of data. To speed up the cross-modal retrieval, a number of binary representation learning methods are proposed to map different modalities of data into a common Hamming space. Then, we introduce several multimodal datasets in the community, and show the experimental results on two commonly used multimodal datasets. The comparison reveals the characteristic of different kinds of cross-modal retrieval methods, which is expected to benefit both practical applications and future research. Finally, we discuss open problems and future research directions.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, 9 table

Deep Ordinal Hashing with Spatial Attention

Hashing has attracted increasing research attentions in recent years due to its high efficiency of computation and storage in image retrieval. Recent works have demonstrated the superiority of simultaneous feature representations and hash functions learning with deep neural networks. However, most existing deep hashing methods directly learn the hash functions by encoding the global semantic information, while ignoring the local spatial information of images. The loss of local spatial structure makes the performance bottleneck of hash functions, therefore limiting its application for accurate similarity retrieval. In this work, we propose a novel Deep Ordinal Hashing (DOH) method, which learns ordinal representations by leveraging the ranking structure of feature space from both local and global views. In particular, to effectively build the ranking structure, we propose to learn the rank correlation space by exploiting the local spatial information from Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) and the global semantic information from the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) simultaneously. More specifically, an effective spatial attention model is designed to capture the local spatial information by selectively learning well-specified locations closely related to target objects. In such hashing framework,the local spatial and global semantic nature of images are captured in an end-to-end ranking-to-hashing manner. Experimental results conducted on three widely-used datasets demonstrate that the proposed DOH method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art hashing methods