Toward Making Unsupervised Graph Hashing Discriminative

Recently, hashing has attracted much attention in visual information retrieval due to its low storage cost and fast query speed. The goal of hashing is to map original high-dimensional data into a low-dimensional binary-code space where the similar data points are assigned similar hash codes and dissimilar points are far away from each other. Existing unsupervised hashing methods mainly focus on recovering the pairwise similarity of the original data in hash space, but do not take specific measures to make the generated binary codes to be discriminative. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel unsupervised hashing method, named “Discriminative Unsupervised Graph Hashing” (DUGH), which takes both similarity and dissimilarity of original data into consideration to learn discriminative binary codes. In particular, a probabilistic model is utilized to learn the encoding of original data in low-dimensional space, which models the original neighbor structure through both positive and negative edges in the KNN graph and then maximizes the likelihood of observing these edges. To efficiently and accurately measure the neighbor structure for large-scale datasets, we propose an effective KNN graph construction algorithm based on the random projection tree and neighbor exploring techniques. The experimental results on one synthetic dataset and four typical real-world image datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised hashing methods.