Unsupervised deep hashing for large-scale visual search

Abstract

Learning based hashing plays a pivotal role in large-scale visual search. However, most existing hashing algorithms tend to learn shallow models that do not seek representative binary codes. In this paper, we propose a novel hashing approach based on unsupervised deep learning to hierarchically transform features into hash codes. Within the heterogeneous deep hashing framework, the autoencoder layers with specific constraints are considered to model the nonlinear mapping between features and binary codes. Then, a Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) layer with constraints is utilized to reduce the dimension in the hamming space. The experiments on the problem of visual search demonstrate the competitiveness of our proposed approach compared to the state of the art.