Nonlinear Discrete Cross-Modal Hashing for Visual-Textual Data

Abstract

Hashing techniques have been widely adopted for cross-modal retrieval due to their low storage cost and fast query speed. Recently, some unimodal hashing methods have tried to directly optimize the objective function with discrete binary constraints. Inspired by these methods, the authors propose a novel supervised cross-modal hashing method called Discrete Cross-Modal Hashing (DCMH) to learn the binary codes without relaxing them. DCMH is formulated through semantic similarity reconstruction, and it learns binary codes for use as ideal features for classification. Furthermore, DCMH alternately updates binary codes for each modality, and its discrete hashing codes are learned efficiently, bit by bit, which is quite promising for large-scale datasets. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed discrete optimization, the authors optimize their objective function in a relax-and-threshold manner. Extensive empirical results on both image-text and image-tag datasets demonstrate that DCMH is a significant improvement over previous approaches in terms of training time and retrieval performance.