Loopy Residual Hashing: Filling the Quantization Gap for Image Retrieval

Hashing has been widely used in large-scale image retrieval based on approximate nearest neighbor search. Most learning-to-hashing methods adopt a two-stage algorithm to generate binary codes. First, original images are mapped into continuous visual features. Then, binary codes are generated by quantization step or separate projection. Nevertheless, these methods are sensitive to quantization operation, i.e., thresholding. To explicitly address this issue, this study proposes a novel feature quantization scheme with a loopy recurrent neural network, called loopy residual hashing, for the purpose of high accuracy in image retrieval. Instead of one-off thresholding-based feature binarization, the proposed approach performs an iterative threshold-then-approximate operation, which calculates the quantization residual after each thresholding step and then imitates another round of binarization to further approximate the coding residual. The resulting sequences of binary codes possess higher representation accuracy and extensive experiments on image retrieval demonstrate its superior discriminative capability over the prior art. In the meantime, theoretical approximation error analysis is given.