Error-Corrected Margin-Based Deep Cross-Modal Hashing for Facial Image Retrieval

Cross-modal hashing facilitates mapping of heterogeneous multimedia data into a common Hamming space, which can be utilized for fast and flexible retrieval across different modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-modal hashing architecture-deep neural decoder cross-modal hashing (DNDCMH), which uses a binary vector specifying the presence of certain facial attributes as an input query to retrieve relevant face images from a database. The DNDCMH network consists of two separate components: an attribute-based deep cross-modal hashing (ADCMH) module, which uses a margin (m)-based loss function to efficiently learn compact binary codes to preserve similarity between modalities in the Hamming space, and a neural error correcting decoder (NECD), which is an error correcting decoder implemented with a neural network. The goal of NECD network in DNDCMH is to error correct the hash codes generated by ADCMH to improve the retrieval efficiency. The NECD network is trained such that it has an error correcting capability greater than or equal to the margin (m) of the margin-based loss function. This results in NECD can correct the corrupted hash codes generated by ADCMH up to the Hamming distance of m. We have evaluated and compared DNDCMH with state-of-the-art cross-modal hashing methods on standard datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our method.