Locality-Sensitive Hashing of Soft Biometrics for Efficient Face Image Database Search and Retrieval

As multimedia technology has advanced in recent years, the use of enormous image libraries has dramatically expanded. In applications for image processing, image retrieval has emerged as a crucial technique. Content-based face image retrieval is a well-established technology in many real-world applications, such as social media, where dependable retrieval capabilities are required to enable quick search among large numbers of images. Humans frequently use faces to recognize and identify individuals. Face recognition from official or personal photos is becoming increasingly popular as it can aid crime detectives in identifying victims and criminals. Furthermore, a large number of images requires a large amount of storage, and the process of image comparison and matching, consequently, takes longer. Hence, the query speed and low storage consumption of hash-based image retrieval techniques have garnered a considerable amount of interest. The main contribution of this work is to try to overcome the challenge of performance improvement in image retrieval by using locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) for retrieving top-matched face images from large-scale databases. We use face soft biometrics as a search input and propose an effective LSH-based method to replace standard face soft biometrics with their corresponding hash codes for searching a large-scale face database and retrieving the top-k of the matching face images with higher accuracy in less time. The experimental results, using the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) database together with the corresponding database of attributes (LFW-attributes), show that our proposed method using LSH face soft biometrics (Soft BioHash) improves the performance of face image database search and retrieval and also outperforms the LSH hard face biometrics method (Hard BioHash).