Multiple hierarchical deep hashing for large scale image retrieval

Learning-based hashing methods are becoming the mainstream for large scale visual search. They consist of two main components: hash codes learning for training data and hash functions learning for encoding new data points. The performance of a content-based image retrieval system crucially depends on the feature representation, and currently Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has been proved effective for extracting high-level visual features for large scale image retrieval. In this paper, we propose a Multiple Hierarchical Deep Hashing (MHDH) approach for large scale image retrieval. Moreover, MHDH seeks to integrate multiple hierarchical non-linear transformations with hidden neural network layer for hashing code generation. The learned binary codes represent potential concepts that connect to class labels. In addition, extensive experiments on two popular datasets demonstrate the superiority of our MHDH over both supervised and unsupervised hashing methods.