Label embedding semantic-guided hashing

Hashing technologies have been widely used for information retrieval tasks due to their efficient retrieval and storage capabilities. Generally, most of the current supervised learning only utilizes labels to construct a binary similarity matrix of instance pairs and ignores the rich semantic information contained in the labels. Indeed, the reason why supervised hashing is better than unsupervised hashing is that the labels itself has strong discriminative information. Therefore, how to effectively explore the label information is one of the ways to improve the performance of retrieval tasks. In addition, existing hashing methods have the problems of high time consumption and weak scalability when facing large-scale data. To remedy these problems, in this paper, we present a flexible two-step label embedding hashing method named Label Embedding Semantic-Guided Hashing (LESGH). In the first step, LESGH leverages an asymmetric discrete learning framework to learn discriminative compact hash codes only from label information, and adds the constraints of bit-balance and bit-decorrelation to boost the quality of the hash code generation. In the second step, LESGH learns the hash projection function through the generated hash codes in the first step. Moreover, an effective and fast iterative discrete optimization algorithm is presented to solve the discrete problem instead of using the relaxation-based scheme. In doing so, we can not only simplify the optimization process, but also easily scale to large-scale data. We conduct several experiments on three public datasets, i.e., WIKI, MIRFlickr and NUS-WIDE, demonstrate that LESGH can improve the retrieval performance over the compared state-of-the-art baselines. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

Hashing technologies are widely used for efficient retrieval and storage in information retrieval tasks. However, most current supervised learning methods only utilize labels to construct a binary similarity matrix, ignoring the rich semantic information contained in the labels. This paper proposes a flexible two-step label embedding hashing method called LESGH, which effectively leverages label information and addresses the time consumption and scalability issues for large-scale data.