Deep Category-Level and Regularized Hashing With Global Semantic Similarity Learning

The hashing technique has been extensively used in large-scale image retrieval applications due to its low storage and fast computing speed. Most existing deep hashing approaches cannot fully consider the global semantic similarity and category-level semantic information, which result in the insufficient utilization of the global semantic similarity for hash codes learning and the semantic information loss of hash codes. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel deep hashing approach with triplet labels, namely, deep category-level and regularized hashing (DCRH), to leverage the global semantic similarity of deep feature and category-level semantic information to enhance the semantic similarity of hash codes. There are four contributions in this article. First, we design a novel global semantic similarity constraint about the deep feature to make the anchor deep feature more similar to the positive deep feature than to the negative deep feature. Second, we leverage label information to enhance category-level semantics of hash codes for hash codes learning. Third, we develop a new triplet construction module to select good image triplets for effective hash functions learning. Finally, we propose a new triplet regularized loss (Reg-L) term, which can force binary-like codes to approximate binary codes and eventually minimize the information loss between binary-like codes and binary codes. Extensive experimental results in three image retrieval benchmark datasets show that the proposed DCRH approach achieves superior performance over other state-of-the-art hashing approaches.