Discrete Semantics-Guided Asymmetric Hashing for Large-Scale Multimedia Retrieval

Cross-modal hashing technology is a key technology for real-time retrieval of large-scale multimedia data in real-world applications. Although the existing cross-modal hashing methods have achieved impressive accomplishment, there are still some limitations: (1) some cross-modal hashing methods do not make full consider the rich semantic information and noise information in labels, resulting in a large semantic gap, and (2) some cross-modal hashing methods adopt the relaxation-based or discrete cyclic coordinate descent algorithm to solve the discrete constraint problem, resulting in a large quantization error or time consumption. Therefore, in order to solve these limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel method, named Discrete Semantics-Guided Asymmetric Hashing (DSAH). Specifically, our proposed DSAH leverages both label information and similarity matrix to enhance the semantic information of the learned hash codes, and the l(2,1) norm is used to increase the sparsity of matrix to solve the problem of the inevitable noise and subjective factors in labels. Meanwhile, an asymmetric hash learning scheme is proposed to efficiently perform hash learning. In addition, a discrete optimization algorithm is proposed to fast solve the hash code directly and discretely. During the optimization process, the hash code learning and the hash function learning interact, i.e., the learned hash codes can guide the learning process of the hash function and the hash function can also guide the hash code generation simultaneously. Extensive experiments performed on two benchmark datasets highlight the superiority of DSAH over several state-of-the-art methods.