Asymmetric Deep Hashing for Efficient Hash Code Compression

Benefiting from recent advances in deep learning, deep hashing methods have achieved promising performance in large-scale image retrieval. To improve storage and computational efficiency, existing hash codes need to be compressed accordingly. However, previous deep hashing methods have to retrain their models and then regenerate the whole database codes using the new models when code length changes, which is time consuming especially for large image databases. In this paper, we propose a novel deep hashing method, called Code Compression oriented Deep Hashing (CCDH), for efficiently compressing hash codes. CCDH learns deep hash functions for query images, while learning a one-hidden-layer Variational Autoencoder (VAE) from existing hash codes. With such asymmetric design, CCDH can efficiently compress database codes only using the learned encoder of VAE. Furthermore, CCDH is flexible enough to be used with a variety of deep hashing methods. Extensive experiments on three widely used image retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that CCDH can significantly reduce the cost for compressing database codes when code length changes while keeping the state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy.