Discrete image hashing using large weakly annotated photo collections

We address the problem of image hashing by learning binary codes from large and weakly supervised photo collections. Due to the explosive growth of user-generated media on the Web, this problem is becoming critical for large-scale visual applications like image retrieval. While most existing hashing methods fail to address this challenge well, our method shows promising improvement due to the following two key advantages. First, we formulate a novel hashing objective that can effectively mine implicit weak supervision by collaborative filtering. Second, we propose a discrete hashing algorithm, offered with efficient optimization, to overcome the inferior optimizations in obtaining binary codes from real-valued solutions. In this way, our method can be considered as a weakly-supervised discrete hashing framework which jointly learns image semantics and their corresponding binary codes. Through training on one million weakly annotated images, our experimental results demonstrate that image retrieval using the proposed hashing method outperforms the other state-of-the-art ones on image and video benchmarks.