Object-Level Visual-Text Correlation Graph Hashing for Unsupervised Cross-Modal Retrieval

The core of cross-modal hashing methods is to map high dimensional features into binary hash codes, which can then efficiently utilize the Hamming distance metric to enhance retrieval efficiency. Recent development emphasizes the advantages of the unsupervised cross-modal hashing technique, since it only relies on relevant information of the paired data, making it more applicable to real-world applications. However, two problems, that is intro-modality correlation and inter-modality correlation, still have not been fully considered. Intra-modality correlation describes the complex overall concept of a single modality and provides semantic relevance for retrieval tasks, while inter-modality correction refers to the relationship between different modalities. From our observation and hypothesis, the dependency relationship within the modality and between different modalities can be constructed at the object level, which can further improve cross-modal hashing retrieval accuracy. To this end, we propose a Visual-textful Correlation Graph Hashing (OVCGH) approach to mine the fine-grained object-level similarity in cross-modal data while suppressing noise interference. Specifically, a novel intra-modality correlation graph is designed to learn graph-level representations of different modalities, obtaining the dependency relationship of the image region to image region and the tag to tag in an unsupervised manner. Then, we design a visual-text dependency building module that can capture correlation semantic information between different modalities by modeling the dependency relationship between image object region and text tag. Extensive experiments on two widely used datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach.