Simultenious binary hash and features learning for image retrieval

Abstract

Content–based image retrieval systems have plenty of applications in modern world. The most important one is the image search by query image or by semantic description. Approaches to this problem are employed in personal photo–collection management systems, web–scale image search engines, medical systems, etc. Automatic analysis of large unlabeled image datasets is virtually impossible without satisfactory image–retrieval technique. It’s the main reason why this kind of automatic image processing has attracted so much attention during recent years. Despite rather huge progress in the field, semantically meaningful image retrieval still remains a challenging task. The main issue here is the demand to provide reliable results in short amount of time. This paper addresses the problem by novel technique for simultaneous learning of global image features and binary hash codes. Our approach provide mapping of pixel–based image representation to hash–value space simultaneously trying to save as much of semantic image content as possible. We use deep learning methodology to generate image description with properties of similarity preservation and statistical independence. The main advantage of our approach in contrast to existing is ability to fine–tune retrieval procedure for very specific application which allow us to provide better results in comparison to general techniques. Presented in the paper framework for data– dependent image hashing is based on use two different kinds of neural networks: convolutional neural networks for image description and autoencoder for feature to hash space mapping. Experimental results confirmed that our approach has shown promising results in compare to other state–of–the–art methods.