Online hashing for fast similarity search

In this thesis, the problem of online adaptive hashing for fast similarity search is studied. Similarity search is a central problem in many computer vision applications. The ever-growing size of available data collections and the increasing usage of high-dimensional representations in describing data have increased the computational cost of performing similarity search, requiring search strategies that can explore such collections in an efficient and effective manner. One promising family of approaches is based on hashing, in which the goal is to map the data into the Hamming space where fast search mechanisms exist, while preserving the original neighborhood structure of the data. We first present a novel online hashing algorithm in which the hash mapping is updated in an iterative manner with streaming data. Being online, our method is amenable to variations of the data. Moreover, our formulation is orders of magnitude faster to train than state-of-the-art hashing solutions. Secondly, we propose an online supervised hashing framework in which the goal is to map data associated with similar labels to nearby binary representations. For this purpose, we utilize Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOCs) and consider an online boosting formulation in learning the hash mapping. Our formulation does not require any prior assumptions on the label space and is well-suited for expanding datasets that have new label inclusions. We also introduce a flexible framework that allows us to reduce hash table entry updates. This is critical, especially when frequent updates may occur as the hash table grows larger and larger. Thirdly, we propose a novel mutual information measure to efficiently infer the quality of a hash mapping and retrieval performance. This measure has lower complexity than standard retrieval metrics. With this measure, we first address a key challenge in online hashing that has often been ignored: the binary representations of the data must be recomputed to keep pace with updates to the hash mapping. Based on our novel mutual information measure, we propose an efficient quality measure for hash functions, and use it to determine when to update the hash table. Next, we show that this mutual information criterion can be used as an objective in learning hash functions, using gradient-based optimization. Experiments on image retrieval benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of our formulation, both in reducing hash table recomputations and in learning high-quality hash functions

Online supervised hashing

Fast nearest neighbor search is becoming more and more crucial given the advent of large-scale data in many computer vision applications. Hashing approaches provide both fast search mechanisms and compact index structures to address this critical need. In image retrieval problems where labeled training data is available, supervised hashing methods prevail over unsupervised methods. Most state-of-the-art supervised hashing approaches employ batch-learners. Unfortunately, batch-learning strategies may be inefficient when confronted with large datasets. Moreover, with batch-learners, it is unclear how to adapt the hash functions as the dataset continues to grow and new variations appear over time. To handle these issues, we propose OSH: an Online Supervised Hashing technique that is based on Error Correcting Output Codes. We consider a stochastic setting where the data arrives sequentially and our method learns and adapts its hashing functions in a discriminative manner. Our method makes no assumption about the number of possible class labels, and accommodates new classes as they are presented in the incoming data stream. In experiments with three image retrieval benchmarks, our method yields state-of-the-art retrieval performance as measured in Mean Average Precision, while also being orders-of-magnitude faster than competing batch methods for supervised hashing. Also, our method significantly outperforms recently introduced online hashing solutions.https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/555b/de4f14630d8606e37096235da8933df228f1.pdfAccepted manuscrip

MIHash: Online Hashing with Mutual Information

Learning-based hashing methods are widely used for nearest neighbor retrieval, and recently, online hashing methods have demonstrated good performance-complexity trade-offs by learning hash functions from streaming data. In this paper, we first address a key challenge for online hashing: the binary codes for indexed data must be recomputed to keep pace with updates to the hash functions. We propose an efficient quality measure for hash functions, based on an information-theoretic quantity, mutual information, and use it successfully as a criterion to eliminate unnecessary hash table updates. Next, we also show how to optimize the mutual information objective using stochastic gradient descent. We thus develop a novel hashing method, MIHash, that can be used in both online and batch settings. Experiments on image retrieval benchmarks (including a 2.5M image dataset) confirm the effectiveness of our formulation, both in reducing hash table recomputations and in learning high-quality hash functions.Comment: International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 201

Hashing as Tie-Aware Learning to Rank

Hashing, or learning binary embeddings of data, is frequently used in nearest neighbor retrieval. In this paper, we develop learning to rank formulations for hashing, aimed at directly optimizing ranking-based evaluation metrics such as Average Precision (AP) and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG). We first observe that the integer-valued Hamming distance often leads to tied rankings, and propose to use tie-aware versions of AP and NDCG to evaluate hashing for retrieval. Then, to optimize tie-aware ranking metrics, we derive their continuous relaxations, and perform gradient-based optimization with deep neural networks. Our results establish the new state-of-the-art for image retrieval by Hamming ranking in common benchmarks.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 201

Deep metric learning to rank

We propose a novel deep metric learning method by revisiting the learning to rank approach. Our method, named FastAP, optimizes the rank-based Average Precision measure, using an approximation derived from distance quantization. FastAP has a low complexity compared to existing methods, and is tailored for stochastic gradient descent. To fully exploit the benefits of the ranking formulation, we also propose a new minibatch sampling scheme, as well as a simple heuristic to enable large-batch training. On three few-shot image retrieval datasets, FastAP consistently outperforms competing methods, which often involve complex optimization heuristics or costly model ensembles.Accepted manuscrip