text: In this paper, we aim to learn a mapping (or embedding) from images to a compact binary space in which Hamming distances correspond to a ranking measure for the image retrieval task. We make use of a triplet loss because this has been shown to be most effective for ranking problems. However, training in previous works can be prohibitively expensive due to the fact that optimization is directly performed on the triplet space, where the number of possible triplets for training is cubic in the number of training examples. To address this issue, we propose to formulate high-order binary codes learning as a multi-label classification problem by explicitly separating learning into two interleaved stages. To solve the first stage, we design a large-scale high-order binary codes inference algorithm to reduce the high-order objective to a standard binary quadratic problem such that graph cuts can be used to efficiently infer the binary code which serve as the label of each training datum. In the second stage we propose to map the original image to compact binary codes via carefully designed deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and the hashing function fitting can be solved by training binary CNN classifiers. An incremental interleaved optimization strategy is proffered to ensure that these two steps are interactive with each other during training for better accuracy. We conduct experiments on several benchmark datasets, which demonstrate both improved training time (by as much as two orders of magnitude) as well as producing state-of-the-art hashing for various retrieval tasks.
  @cite_30: With the rapid growth of web images, hashing has received increasing interests in large scale image retrieval. Research efforts have been devoted to learning compact binary codes that preserve semantic similarity based on labels. However, most of these hashing methods are designed to handle simple binary similarity. The complex multi-level semantic structure of images associated with multiple labels have not yet been well explored. Here we propose a deep semantic ranking based method for learning hash functions that preserve multilevel semantic similarity between multi-label images. In our approach, deep convolutional neural network is incorporated into hash functions to jointly learn feature representations and mappings from them to hash codes, which avoids the limitation of semantic representation power of hand-crafted features. Meanwhile, a ranking list that encodes the multilevel similarity information is employed to guide the learning of such deep hash functions. An effective scheme based on surrogate loss is used to solve the intractable optimization problem of nonsmooth and multivariate ranking measures involved in the learning procedure. Experimental results show the superiority of our proposed approach over several state-of-the-art hashing methods in term of ranking evaluation metrics when tested on multi-label image datasets.
  @cite_18: Similarity-preserving hashing is a widely-used method for nearest neighbour search in large-scale image retrieval tasks. For most existing hashing methods, an image is first encoded as a vector of hand-engineering visual features, followed by another separate projection or quantization step that generates binary codes. However, such visual feature vectors may not be optimally compatible with the coding process, thus producing sub-optimal hashing codes. In this paper, we propose a deep architecture for supervised hashing, in which images are mapped into binary codes via carefully designed deep neural networks. The pipeline of the proposed deep architecture consists of three building blocks: 1) a sub-network with a stack of convolution layers to produce the effective intermediate image features; 2) a divide-and-encode module to divide the intermediate image features into multiple branches, each encoded into one hash bit; and 3) a triplet ranking loss designed to characterize that one image is more similar to the second image than to the third one. Extensive evaluations on several benchmark image datasets show that the proposed simultaneous feature learning and hash coding pipeline brings substantial improvements over other state-of-the-art supervised or unsupervised hashing methods.
summary: Recently hashing using deep learning has shown great promise. The authors of @cite_30 @cite_18 learn hash bits such that multilevel semantic similarities are kept, taking raw pixels as input and training a deep CNN. This has the effect of simultaneously learning an image feature representation (in the early layers of the network) and the hash bits, which are obtained by thresholding the outputs of the last network layer, or at 0.5. Note that these methods suffer from huge computation complexity introduced by the triplet ranking loss for hashing. In contrast, our proposed method is much more efficient in training, as shown in our experiments.