Simultaneous Feature Aggregating and Hashing for Large-scale Image Search
This work addresses a bottleneck in large-scale image search systems for computer vision applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of designing feature aggregation and hashing independently in image search by proposing a joint optimization framework that produces more discriminative binary hash codes, leading to improved retrieval accuracy on benchmark datasets.
In most state-of-the-art hashing-based visual search systems, local image descriptors of an image are first aggregated as a single feature vector. This feature vector is then subjected to a hashing function that produces a binary hash code. In previous work, the aggregating and the hashing processes are designed independently. In this paper, we propose a novel framework where feature aggregating and hashing are designed simultaneously and optimized jointly. Specifically, our joint optimization produces aggregated representations that can be better reconstructed by some binary codes. This leads to more discriminative binary hash codes and improved retrieval accuracy. In addition, we also propose a fast version of the recently-proposed Binary Autoencoder to be used in our proposed framework. We perform extensive retrieval experiments on several benchmark datasets with both SIFT and convolutional features. Our results suggest that the proposed framework achieves significant improvements over the state of the art.