Fast Cross-Modal Hashing With Global and Local Similarity Embedding

Recently, supervised cross-modal hashing has attracted much attention and achieved promising performance. To learn hash functions and binary codes, most methods globally exploit the supervised information, for example, preserving an at-least-one pairwise similarity into hash codes or reconstructing the label matrix with binary codes. However, due to the hardness of the discrete optimization problem, they are usually time consuming on large-scale datasets. In addition, they neglect the class correlation in supervised information. From another point of view, they only explore the global similarity of data but overlook the local similarity hidden in the data distribution. To address these issues, we present an efficient supervised cross-modal hashing method, that is, fast cross-modal hashing (FCMH). It leverages not only global similarity information but also the local similarity in a group. Specifically, training samples are partitioned into groups; thereafter, the local similarity in each group is extracted. Moreover, the class correlation in labels is also exploited and embedded into the learning of binary codes. In addition, to solve the discrete optimization problem, we further propose an efficient discrete optimization algorithm with a well-designed group updating scheme, making its computational complexity linear to the size of the training set. In light of this, it is more efficient and scalable to large-scale datasets. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that FCMH outperforms some state-of-the-art cross-modal hashing approaches in terms of both retrieval accuracy and learning efficiency.