LBMCH: Learning Bridging Mapping for Cross -modal Hashing

Hashing has gained considerable attention on large-scale similarity search, due to its enjoyable efficiency and low storage cost. In this paper, we study the problem of learning hash functions in the context of multi-modal data for cross-modal similarity search. Notwithstanding the progress achieved by existing methods, they essentially learn only one common hamming space, where data objects from all modalities are mapped to conduct similarity search. However, such method is unable to well characterize the flexible and discriminative local (neighborhood) structure in all modalities simultaneously, hindering them to achieve better performance. Bearing such stand-out limitation, we propose to learn heterogeneous hamming spaces with each preserving the local structure of data objects from an individual modality. Then, a novel method to learning bridging mapping for cross-modal hashing, named LBMCH, is proposed to characterize the cross-modal semantic correspondence by seamlessly connecting these distinct hamming spaces. Meanwhile, the local structure of each data object in a modality is preserved by constructing an anchor based representation, enabling LBMCH to characterize a linear complexity w.r.t the size of training set. The efficacy of LBMCH is experimentally validated against real-world cross-modal datasets.