Weakly-supervised Semantic Guided Hashing for Social Image Retrieval

Hashing has been widely investigated for large-scale image retrieval due to its search effectiveness and computation efficiency. In this work, we propose a novel Semantic Guided Hashing method coupled with binary matrix factorization to perform more effective nearest neighbor image search by simultaneously exploring the weakly-supervised rich community-contributed information and the underlying data structures. To uncover the underlying semantic information from the weakly-supervised user-provided tags, the binary matrix factorization model is leveraged for learning the binary features of images while the problem of imperfect tags is well addressed. The uncovered semantic information enables to well guide the discrete hash code learning. The underlying data structures are discovered by adaptively learning a discriminative data graph, which makes the learned hash codes preserve the meaningful neighbors. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method is the first work that incorporates the hash code learning, the semantic information mining and the data structure discovering into one unified framework. Besides, the proposed method is extended to one deep approach for the optimal compatibility of discriminative feature learning and hash code learning. Experiments are conducted on two widely-used social image datasets and the proposed method achieves encouraging performance compared with the state-of-the-art hashing methods.