Binary Optimized Hashing

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of learning to hash, which is essentially a mixed integer optimization problem, containing both the binary hash code output and the (continuous) parameters forming the hash functions. Different from existing relaxation methods in hashing, which have no theoretical guarantees for the error bound of the relaxations, we propose binary optimized hashing (BOH), in which we prove that if the loss function is Lipschitz continuous, the binary optimization problem can be relaxed to a bound-constrained continuous optimization problem. Then we introduce a surrogate objective function, which only depends on unbinarized hash functions and does not need the slack variables transforming unbinarized hash functions to discrete functions, to approximate the relaxed objective function. We show that the approximation error is bounded and the bound is small when the problem is optimized. We apply the proposed approach to learn hash codes from either handcraft feature inputs or raw image inputs. Extensive experiments are carried out on three benchmarks, demonstrating that our approach outperforms state-of-the-arts with a significant margin on search accuracies.