Supervised Hierarchical Deep Hashing for Cross-Modal Retrieval

Cross-modal hashing has attracted much attention in the large-scale multimedia search area. In many real applications, labels of samples have hierarchical structure which also contains much useful information for learning. However, most existing methods are originally designed for non-hierarchical labeled data and thus fail to exploit the rich information of the label hierarchy. In this paper, we propose an effective cross-modal hashing method, named Supervised Hierarchical Deep Cross-modal Hashing, SHDCH for short, to learn hash codes by explicitly delving into the hierarchical labels. Specifically, both the similarity at each layer of the label hierarchy and the relatedness across different layers are implanted into the hash-code learning. Besides, an iterative optimization algorithm is proposed to directly learn the discrete hash codes instead of relaxing the binary constraints. We conducted extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and the experimental results show the superior performance of SHDCH over several state-of-the-art methods.