Feature hashing

About: Feature hashing is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 993 publications have been published within this topic receiving 51462 citations.

Multi-View Complementary Hash Tables for Nearest Neighbor Search

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the success of hashing techniques in fast nearest neighbor search. In practice many applications (eg., visual search, object detection, image matching, etc.) have enjoyed the benefits of complementary hash tables and information fusion over multiple views. However, most of prior research mainly focused on compact hash code cleaning, and rare work studies how to build multiple complementary hash tables, much less to adaptively integrate information stemming from multiple views. In this paper we first present a novel multi-view complementary hash table method that learns complementarity hash tables from the data with multiple views. For single multi-view table, using exemplar based feature fusion, we approximate the inherent data similarities with a low-rank matrix, and learn discriminative hash functions in an efficient way. To build complementary tables and meanwhile maintain scalable training and fast out-of-sample extension, an exemplar reweighting scheme is introduced to update the induced low-rank similarity in the sequential table construction framework, which indeed brings mutual benefits between tables by placing greater importance on exemplars shared by mis-separated neighbors. Extensive experiments on three large-scale image datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms various naive solutions and state-of-the-art multi-table methods.

Unsupervised Local Feature Hashing for Image Similarity Search

Abstract: The potential value of hashing techniques has led to it becoming one of the most active research areas in computer vision and multimedia. However, most existing hashing methods for image search and retrieval are based on global feature representations, which are susceptible to image variations such as viewpoint changes and background cluttering. Traditional global representations gather local features directly to output a single vector without the analysis of the intrinsic geometric property of local features. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised hashing method called unsupervised bilinear local hashing (UBLH) for projecting local feature descriptors from a high-dimensional feature space to a lower-dimensional Hamming space via compact bilinear projections rather than a single large projection matrix. UBLH takes the matrix expression of local features as input and preserves the feature-to-feature and image-to-image structures of local features simultaneously. Experimental results on challenging data sets including Caltech-256, SUN397, and Flickr 1M demonstrate the superiority of UBLH compared with state-of-the-art hashing methods.

Ranking preserving hashing for fast similarity search

Abstract: Hashing method becomes popular for large scale similarity search due to its storage and computational efficiency. Many machine learning techniques, ranging from unsupervised to supervised, have been proposed to design compact hashing codes. Most of the existing hashing methods generate binary codes to efficiently find similar data examples to a query. However, the ranking accuracy among the retrieved data examples is not modeled. But in many real world applications, ranking measure is important for evaluating the quality of hashing codes. In this paper, we propose a novel Ranking Preserving Hashing (RPH) approach that directly optimizes a popular ranking measure, Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), to obtain effective hashing codes with high ranking accuracy. The main difficulty in the direct optimization of NDCG measure is that it depends on the ranking order of data examples, which forms a non-convex nonsmooth optimization problem. We address this challenge by optimizing the expectation of NDCG measure calculated based on a linear hashing function. A gradient descent method is designed to achieve the goal. An extensive set of experiments on two large scale datasets demonstrate the superior ranking performance of the proposed approach over several state-of-the-art hashing methods.

Large-Scale Unsupervised Hashing with Shared Structure Learning

Abstract: Hashing methods are effective in generating compact binary signatures for images and videos. This paper addresses an important open issue in the literature, i.e., how to learn compact hash codes by enhancing the complementarity among different hash functions. Most of prior studies solve this problem either by adopting time-consuming sequential learning algorithms or by generating the hash functions which are subject to some deliberately-designed constraints (e.g., enforcing hash functions orthogonal to one another). We analyze the drawbacks of past works and propose a new solution to this problem. Our idea is to decompose the feature space into a subspace shared by all hash functions and its complementary subspace. On one hand, the shared subspace, corresponding to the common structure across different hash functions, conveys most relevant information for the hashing task. Similar to data de-noising, irrelevant information is explicitly suppressed during hash function generation. On the other hand, in case that the complementary subspace also contains useful information for specific hash functions, the final form of our proposed hashing scheme is a compromise between these two kinds of subspaces. To make hash functions not only preserve the local neighborhood structure but also capture the global cluster distribution of the whole data, an objective function incorporating spectral embedding loss, binary quantization loss, and shared subspace contribution is introduced to guide the hash function learning. We propose an efficient alternating optimization method to simultaneously learn both the shared structure and the hash functions. Experimental results on three well-known benchmarks CIFAR-10, NUS-WIDE, and a-TRECVID demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art hashing methods.

External perfect hashing for very large key sets

Abstract: We present a simple and efficient external perfect hashing scheme (referred to as EPH algorithm) for very large static key sets. We use a number of techniques from the literature to obtain a novel scheme that is theoretically well-understood and at the same time achieves an order-of-magnitude increase in the size of the problem to be solved compared to previous "practical" methods. We demonstrate the scalability of our algorithm by constructing minimum perfect hash functions for a set of 1.024 billion URLs from the World Wide Web of average length 64 characters in approximately 62 minutes, using a commodity PC. Our scheme produces minimal perfect hash functions using approximately 3.8 bits per key. For perfect hash functions in the range {0,...,2n - 1} the space usage drops to approximately 2.7 bits per key. The main contribution is the first algorithm that has experimentally proven practicality for sets in the order of billions of keys and has time and space usage carefully analyzed without unrealistic assumptions.