Shared Predictive Cross-Modal Deep Quantization

With explosive growth of data volume and ever-increasing diversity of data modalities, cross-modal similarity search, which conducts nearest neighbor search across different modalities, has been attracting increasing interest. This paper presents a deep compact code learning solution for efficient cross-modal similarity search. Many recent studies have proven that quantization-based approaches perform generally better than hashing-based approaches on single-modal similarity search. In this paper, we propose a deep quantization approach, which is among the early attempts of leveraging deep neural networks into quantization-based cross-modal similarity search. Our approach, dubbed shared predictive deep quantization (SPDQ), explicitly formulates a shared subspace across different modalities and two private subspaces for individual modalities, and representations in the shared subspace and the private subspaces are learned simultaneously by embedding them to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, where the mean embedding of different modality distributions can be explicitly compared. In addition, in the shared subspace, a quantizer is learned to produce the semantics preserving compact codes with the help of label alignment. Thanks to this novel network architecture in cooperation with supervised quantization training, SPDQ can preserve intramodal and intermodal similarities as much as possible and greatly reduce quantization error. Experiments on two popular benchmarks corroborate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods

Correlation Hashing Network for Efficient Cross-Modal Retrieval

Hashing is widely applied to approximate nearest neighbor search for large-scale multimodal retrieval with storage and computation efficiency. Cross-modal hashing improves the quality of hash coding by exploiting semantic correlations across different modalities. Existing cross-modal hashing methods first transform data into low-dimensional feature vectors, and then generate binary codes by another separate quantization step. However, suboptimal hash codes may be generated since the quantization error is not explicitly minimized and the feature representation is not jointly optimized with the binary codes. This paper presents a Correlation Hashing Network (CHN) approach to cross-modal hashing, which jointly learns good data representation tailored to hash coding and formally controls the quantization error. The proposed CHN is a hybrid deep architecture that constitutes a convolutional neural network for learning good image representations, a multilayer perception for learning good text representations, two hashing layers for generating compact binary codes, and a structured max-margin loss that integrates all things together to enable learning similarity-preserving and high-quality hash codes. Extensive empirical study shows that CHN yields state of the art cross-modal retrieval performance on standard benchmarks.Comment: 7 page

Simultaneous Feature Aggregating and Hashing for Large-scale Image Search

In most state-of-the-art hashing-based visual search systems, local image descriptors of an image are first aggregated as a single feature vector. This feature vector is then subjected to a hashing function that produces a binary hash code. In previous work, the aggregating and the hashing processes are designed independently. In this paper, we propose a novel framework where feature aggregating and hashing are designed simultaneously and optimized jointly. Specifically, our joint optimization produces aggregated representations that can be better reconstructed by some binary codes. This leads to more discriminative binary hash codes and improved retrieval accuracy. In addition, we also propose a fast version of the recently-proposed Binary Autoencoder to be used in our proposed framework. We perform extensive retrieval experiments on several benchmark datasets with both SIFT and convolutional features. Our results suggest that the proposed framework achieves significant improvements over the state of the art.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 201

Unsupervised Multi-modal Hashing for Cross-modal retrieval

With the advantage of low storage cost and high efficiency, hashing learning has received much attention in the domain of Big Data. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised hashing learning method to cope with this open problem to directly preserve the manifold structure by hashing. To address this problem, both the semantic correlation in textual space and the locally geometric structure in the visual space are explored simultaneously in our framework. Besides, the `2;1-norm constraint is imposed on the projection matrices to learn the discriminative hash function for each modality. Extensive experiments are performed to evaluate the proposed method on the three publicly available datasets and the experimental results show that our method can achieve superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

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

Collaborative Learning for Extremely Low Bit Asymmetric Hashing

Hashing techniques are in great demand for a wide range of real-world applications such as image retrieval and network compression. Nevertheless, existing approaches could hardly guarantee a satisfactory performance with the extremely low-bit (e.g., 4-bit) hash codes due to the severe information loss and the shrink of the discrete solution space. In this paper, we propose a novel \textit{Collaborative Learning} strategy that is tailored for generating high-quality low-bit hash codes. The core idea is to jointly distill bit-specific and informative representations for a group of pre-defined code lengths. The learning of short hash codes among the group can benefit from the manifold shared with other long codes, where multiple views from different hash codes provide the supplementary guidance and regularization, making the convergence faster and more stable. To achieve that, an asymmetric hashing framework with two variants of multi-head embedding structures is derived, termed as Multi-head Asymmetric Hashing (MAH), leading to great efficiency of training and querying. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets have been conducted to verify the superiority of the proposed MAH, and have shown that the 8-bit hash codes generated by MAH achieve $94.3\%$ of the MAP (Mean Average Precision (MAP)) score on the CIFAR-10 dataset, which significantly surpasses the performance of the 48-bit codes by the state-of-the-arts in image retrieval tasks

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

Snap and Find: Deep Discrete Cross-domain Garment Image Retrieval

With the increasing number of online stores, there is a pressing need for intelligent search systems to understand the item photos snapped by customers and search against large-scale product databases to find their desired items. However, it is challenging for conventional retrieval systems to match up the item photos captured by customers and the ones officially released by stores, especially for garment images. To bridge the customer- and store- provided garment photos, existing studies have been widely exploiting the clothing attributes (\textit{e.g.,} black) and landmarks (\textit{e.g.,} collar) to learn a common embedding space for garment representations. Unfortunately they omit the sequential correlation of attributes and consume large quantity of human labors to label the landmarks. In this paper, we propose a deep multi-task cross-domain hashing termed \textit{DMCH}, in which cross-domain embedding and sequential attribute learning are modeled simultaneously. Sequential attribute learning not only provides the semantic guidance for embedding, but also generates rich attention on discriminative local details (\textit{e.g.,} black buttons) of clothing items without requiring extra landmark labels. This leads to promising performance and 306$\times$ boost on efficiency when compared with the state-of-the-art models, which is demonstrated through rigorous experiments on two public fashion datasets

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

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