Unsupervised Deep Hashing with Structured Similarity Learning

Unsupervised deep hashing has demonstrated significant advancements with the development of contrastive learning. However, most of previous methods have been hindered by insufficient similarity mining using global-only image representations. This has led to interference from background or non-interest objects during similarity reconstruction and contrastive learning. To address this limitation, we propose a novel unsupervised deep hashing framework named Fine-grained Similarity-preserving Contrastive learning Hashing (FSCH), which explores fine-grained semantic similarity among different images and their augmented views more comprehensively. It mainly comprises two modules: the global-local fine-grained similarity consistency preservation module and the local fine-grained similarity contrast preservation module. Specifically, we reconstruct local pairwise similarity structures by matching fine-grained patches, in conjunction with global similarity structures based on global hash codes cosine similarity, to generate hash codes with the ability to preserve global-local similarity consistency. Moreover, the preservation of local fine-grained similarity among augmented views is accomplished through the common regional features mutual representation between patches, then we enhance the discriminability of hash codes by mitigating the potential features difference during contrastive learning. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our FSCH achieves an excellent retrieval performance compared to state-of-the-art unsupervised hashing methods.

Cross-modal hashing encodes heterogeneous multimedia data into compact binary code to achieve fast and flexible retrieval across different modalities. Due to its low storage cost and high retrieval efficiency, it has received widespread attention. Supervised deep hashing significantly improves search performance and usually yields more accurate results, but requires a lot of manual annotation of the data. In contrast, unsupervised deep hashing is difficult to achieve satisfactory performance due to the lack of reliable supervisory information. To solve this problem, inspired by knowledge distillation, we propose a novel unsupervised knowledge distillation cross-modal hashing method based on semantic alignment (SAKDH), which can reconstruct the similarity matrix using the hidden correlation information of the pretrained unsupervised teacher model, and the reconstructed similarity matrix can be used to guide the supervised student model. Specifically, firstly, the teacher model adopted an unsupervised semantic alignment hashing method, which can construct a modal fusion similarity matrix. Secondly, under the supervision of teacher model distillation information, the student model can generate more discriminative hash codes. Experimental results on two extensive benchmark datasets (MIRFLICKR-25K and NUS-WIDE) show that compared to several representative unsupervised cross-modal hashing methods, the mean average precision (MAP) of our proposed method has achieved a significant improvement. It fully reflects its effectiveness in large-scale cross-modal data retrieval.

Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search is a challenging problem with the explosive high-dimensional large-scale data in recent years. The promising technique for ANN search include hashing methods which generate compact binary codes by designing effective hash functions. However, lack of an optimal regularization is the key limitation of most of the existing hash functions. To this end, a new method called Adaptive Hashing with Sparse Modification (AHSM) is proposed. In AHSM, codes consist of vertices on the hypercube and the projection matrix is divided into two separate matrices. Data is rotated through a orthogonal matrix first and modified by a sparse matrix. Here the sparse matrix needs to be learned as a regularization item of hash function which is used to avoid overfitting and reduce quantization distortion. Totally, AHSM has two advantages: improvement of the accuracy without any time cost increasement. Furthermore, we extend AHSM to a supervised version, called Supervised Adaptive Hashing with Sparse Modification (SAHSM), by introducing Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) to the original data. Experiments show that the AHSM method stably surpasses several state-of-the-art hashing methods on four data sets. And at the same time, we compare three unsupervised hashing methods with their corresponding supervised version (including SAHSM) on three data sets with labels known. Similarly, SAHSM outperforms other methods on most of the hash bits.

Hashing has been widely used for large-scale remote sensing image retrieval due to its outstanding advantages in storage and search speed. Recently, deep hashing methods, which produce discriminative hash codes by building end-to-end deep convolutional networks, have shown promising results. However, training these networks requires numerous labeled images, which are scarce and expensive in remote sensing datasets. In order to solve this problem, we propose a deep unsupervised hashing method, namely deep contrastive self-supervised hashing (DCSH), which uses only unlabeled images to learn accurate hash codes. It eliminates the need for label annotation by maximizing the consistency of different views generated from the same image. More specifically, we assume that the hash codes generated from different views of the same image are similar, and those generated from different images are dissimilar. On the basis of the hypothesis, we can develop a novel loss function containing the temperature-scaled cross-entropy loss and the quantization loss to train the developed deep network end-to-end, resulting in hash codes with semantic similarity preserved. Our proposed network contains four parts. First, each image is transformed into two different views using data augmentation. After that, they are fed into an encoder with the same shared parameters to obtain deep discriminate features. Following this, a hash layer converts the high-dimensional image representations into compact binary codes. Lastly, a novel hash function is introduced to train the proposed network end-to-end and thus guide generated hash codes with semantic similarity. Extensive experiments on two popular benchmark datasets of the UC Merced Land Use Database and the Aerial Image Dataset have demonstrated that our DCSH has significant superiority in remote sensing image retrieval compared with state-of-the-art unsupervised hashing methods.

Hashing has drawn more and more attention in image retrieval due to its high search speed and low storage cost. Traditional hashing methods project the high-dimensional hand-crafted visual features to compact binary codes by linear or non-linear hashing functions. Deep hashing methods, which integrate image representation learning and hash functions learning into a unified framework, have shown more superior performance. Most of existing supervised deep hashing methods mainly consider the semantic similarities among images by using pair-wise or triplet-wise constraints as supervision information. However, as a kind of crucial information, the rankings of the retrieval results, are neglected. Consequently, the produced hash codes may be suboptimal. In this paper, a new Deep Hashing with Top Similarity Preserving (DHTSP) method is proposed to optimize the quality of hash codes for image retrieval. Specifically, we utilize AlexNet to extract discriminative image representations directly from the raw image pixels and learn hash functions simultaneously. Then a top similarity preserving loss function is designed to preserve the similarity of returned images at the top of the ranking list. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show that our proposed method outperforms most of state-of-the-art deep hashing methods and traditional hashing methods.

Deep debiased contrastive hashing

Benefitting from the low storage cost and high retrieval efficiency, hash learning has become a widely used retrieval technology to approximate nearest neighbors. Within it, the cross-modal medical hashing has attracted an increasing attention in facilitating efficiently clinical decision. However, there are still two main challenges in weak multi-manifold structure perseveration across multiple modalities and weak discriminability of hash code. Specifically, existing cross-modal hashing methods focus on pairwise relations within two modalities, and ignore underlying multi-manifold structures across over 2 modalities. Then, there is little consideration about discriminability, i.e., any pair of hash codes should be different. In this paper, we propose a novel hashing method named multi-manifold deep discriminative cross-modal hashing (MDDCH) for large-scale medical image retrieval. The key point is multi-modal manifold similarity which integrates multiple sub-manifolds defined on heterogeneous data to preserve correlation among instances, and it can be measured by three-step connection on corresponding hetero-manifold. Then, we propose discriminative item to make each hash code encoded by hash functions be different, which improves discriminative performance of hash code. Besides, we introduce Gaussian-binary Restricted Boltzmann Machine to directly output hash codes without using any continuous relaxation. Experiments on three benchmark datasets (AIBL, Brain and SPLP) show that our proposed MDDCH achieves comparative performance to recent state-of-the-art hashing methods. Additionally, diagnostic evaluation from professional physicians shows that all the retrieved medical images describe the same object and illness as the queried image.

Deep hashing methods utilize an end-to-end framework to mutually learn feature representations and hash codes, thereby achieving a better retrieval performance. Traditional supervised hashing methods adopt handcrafted features for hashing function learning and then generate hash codes through classification and quantization. The lack of adaptability and independence of the quantization procedure leads to low retrieval accuracy of supervised hashing methods with handcrafted features in image retrieval. In this study, a non-relaxation deep hashing method for fast image retrieval is proposed. In this method, a differentiable host thresholding function is used to encourage hash-like codes to approach -1 or 1 non-linearly at the output of the convolutional neural, instead of the symbol function for quantization used in the traditional method. The output of the host thresholding function is directly used to compute the network training error, and a loss function is elaborately designed with the norm to constrain each bit of the hash-like code to be as binary as possible. Finally, a symbol function is added outside the trained network model to generate binary hash codes for image storage and retrieval in a low-dimensional binary space. Extensive experiments on two large-scale public datasets show that our method can effectively learn image features, generate accurate binary hash codes, and outperform state-of-the-art methods in terms of the mean average precision.

Hashing method maps similar data to binary hashcodes with smaller hamming distance, which has received broad attention due to its low storage cost and fast retrieval speed. With the rapid development of deep learning, deep hashing methods have achieved promising results in efficient information retrieval. Most existing deep hashing methods adopt pairwise or triplet losses to deal with similarities underlying the data, but their training are difficult and less efficient because O(n2) data pairs and O(n3) triplets are involved. To address these issues, we propose a novel deep hashing algorithm with unary loss which can be trained very efficiently. First of all, we introduce a Unary Upper Bound of the traditional triplet loss, thus reducing the complexity to O(n) and bridging the classificationbased unary loss and the triplet loss. Second, we propose a novel Semantic Cluster Deep Hashing (SCDH) algorithm by introducing a modified Unary Upper Bound loss, named Semantic Cluster Unary Loss (SCUL). The resultant hashcodes form several compact clusters, which means hashcodes in the same cluster have similar semantic information. We also demonstrate that the proposed SCDH is easy to be extended to semi-supervised settings by incorporating the state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning algorithms. Experiments on large-scale datasets show that the proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art hashing algorithms.

Recently, unsupervised Hashing has attracted much attention in the machine learning and information retrieval communities, due to its low storage and high search efficiency. Most of existing unsupervised Hashing methods rely on the local semantic structure of the data as the guiding information, requiring to preserve such semantic structure in the Hamming space. Thus, how to precisely represent the local structure of the data and Hashing code s becomes the key point to success. This study proposes a novel Hashing method based on self-supervised learning. Specifically, it is proposed to utilize the contrast learning to acquire a compact and accurate feature representation for each sample, and then a semantic structure matrix can be constructed for representing the similarity between samples. Meanwhile, a new loss function is proposed to preserve the semantic information and improve the discriminative ability in the Hamming space, by the spirit of the instance discrimination method proposed recently. The proposed framework is end-to-end trainable. Extensive experiments on two large-scale image retrieval data sets show that the proposed method can significantly outperform current state-of-the-art methods.

In order to achieve efficient similarity searching, hash functions are designed to encode images into low-dimensional binary codes with the constraint that similar features will have a short distance in the projected Hamming space. Recently, deep learning-based methods have become more popular, and outperform traditional non-deep methods. However, without label information, most state-of-the-art unsupervised deep hashing (DH) algorithms suffer from severe performance degradation for unsupervised scenarios. One of the main reasons is that the ad-hoc encoding process cannot properly capture the visual feature distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised framework that has two main contributions: 1) we convert the unsupervised DH model into supervised by discovering pseudo labels; 2) the framework unifies likelihood maximization, mutual information maximization, and quantization error minimization so that the pseudo labels can maximumly preserve the distribution of visual features. Extensive experiments on three popular data sets demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method, which leads to significant performance improvement over the state-of-the-art unsupervised hashing algorithms.

In recent years, with the explosion of multimedia data from search engines, social media, and e-commerce platforms, there is an urgent need for fast retrieval methods for massive big data. Hashing is widely used in large-scale and high-dimensional data search because of its low storage cost and fast query speed. Thanks to the great success of deep learning in many fields, the deep learning method has been introduced into hashing retrieval, and it uses a deep neural network to learn image features and hash codes simultaneously. Compared with the traditional hashing methods, it has better performance. However, existing deep hashing methods have some limitations; for example, most methods consider only one kind of supervised loss, which leads to insufficient utilization of supervised information. To address this issue, we proposed a triplet deep hashing method with joint supervised loss based on the convolutional neural network (JLTDH) in this work. The proposed method JLTDH combines triplet likelihood loss and linear classification loss; moreover, the triplet supervised label is adopted, which contains richer supervised information than that of the pointwise and pairwise labels. At the same time, in order to overcome the cubic increase in the number of triplets and make triplet training more effective, we adopt a novel triplet selection method. The whole process is divided into two stages: In the first stage, taking the triplets generated by the triplet selection method as the input of the CNN, the three CNNs with shared weights are used for image feature learning, and the last layer of the network outputs a preliminary hash code. In the second stage, relying on the hash code of the first stage and the joint loss function, the neural network model is further optimized so that the generated hash code has higher query precision. We perform extensive experiments on the three public benchmark datasets CIFAR-10, NUS-WIDE, and MS-COCO. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the compared methods, and the method is also superior to all previous deep hashing methods based on the triplet label.

Cross-modal hashing has received widespread attentions on cross-modal retrieval task due to its superior retrieval efficiency and low storage cost. However, most existing cross-modal hashing methods learn binary codes directly from multimedia data, which cannot fully utilize the semantic knowledge of the data. Furthermore, they cannot learn the ranking based similarity relevance of data points with multi-label. And they usually use a relax constraint of hash code which causes non-negligible quantization loss in the optimization. In this paper, a hashing method called Deep Adversarial Discrete Hashing (DADH) is proposed to address these issues for cross-modal retrieval. The proposed method uses adversarial training to learn features across modalities and ensure the distribution consistency of feature representations across modalities. We also introduce a weighted cosine triplet constraint which can make full use of semantic knowledge from the multi-label to ensure the precise ranking relevance of item pairs. In addition, we use a discrete hashing strategy to learn the discrete binary codes without relaxation, by which the semantic knowledge from label in the hash codes can be preserved while the quantization loss can be minimized. Ablation experiments and comparison experiments on two cross-modal databases show that the proposed DADH improves the performance and outperforms several state-of-the-art hashing methods for cross-modal retrieval.

Existing speech retrieval systems are frequently confronted with expanding volumes of speech data. The dynamic updating strategy applied to construct the index can timely process to add or remove unnecessary speech data to meet users’ real-time retrieval requirements. This study proposes an efficient method for retrieving encryption speech, using unsupervised deep hashing and B+ tree dynamic index, which avoid privacy leakage of speech data and enhance the accuracy and efficiency of retrieval. The cloud’s encryption speech library is constructed by using the multi-threaded Dijk-Gentry-Halevi-Vaikuntanathan (DGHV) Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technique, which encrypts the original speech. In addition, this research employs Residual Neural Network18-Gated Recurrent Unit (ResNet18-GRU), which is used to learn the compact binary hash codes, store binary hash codes in the designed B+ tree index table, and create a mapping relation of one to one between the binary hash codes and the corresponding encrypted speech. External B+ tree index technology is applied to achieve dynamic index updating of the B+ tree index table, thereby satisfying users’ needs for real-time retrieval. The experimental results on THCHS-30 and TIMIT showed that the retrieval accuracy of the proposed method is more than 95.84% compared to the existing unsupervised hashing methods. The retrieval efficiency is greatly improved. Compared to the method of using hash index tables, and the speech data’s security is effectively guaranteed.

Hashing could significantly accelerate large-scale image search by transforming the high-dimensional features into binary Hamming space, where efficient similarity search can be achieved with very fast Hamming distance computation and extremely low storage cost. As an important branch of hashing methods, multi-view hashing takes advantages of multiple features from different views for binary hash learning. However, existing multi-view hashing methods are either based on shallow models which fail to fully capture the intrinsic correlations of heterogeneous views, or unsupervised deep models which suffer from insufficient semantics and cannot effectively exploit the complementarity of view features. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Collaborative Multi-view Hashing (DCMVH) method to deeply fuse multi-view features and learn multi-view hash codes collaboratively under a deep architecture. DCMVH is a new deep multi-view hash learning framework. It mainly consists of 1) multiple view-specific networks to extract hidden representations of different views, and 2) a fusion network to learn multi-view fused hash code. DCMVH associates different layers with instance-wise and pair-wise semantic labels respectively. In this way, the discriminative capability of representation layers can be progressively enhanced and meanwhile the complementarity of different view features can be exploited effectively. Finally, we develop a fast discrete hash optimization method based on augmented Lagrangian multiplier to efficiently solve the binary hash codes. Experiments on public multi-view image search datasets demonstrate our approach achieves substantial performance improvement over state-of-the-art methods.