Learning Multifunctional Binary Codes for Personalized Image Retrieval

Due to the highly complex semantic information of images, even with the same query image, the expected content-based image retrieval results could be very different and personalized in different scenarios. However, most existing hashing methods only preserve one single type of semantic similarity, making them incapable of addressing such realistic retrieval tasks. To deal with this problem, we propose a unified hashing framework to encode multiple types of information into the binary codes by exploiting convolutional networks (CNNs). Specifically, we assume that typical retrieval tasks are generally defined in two aspects, i.e. high-level semantics (e.g. object categories) and visual attributes (e.g. object shape and color). To this end, our Dual Purpose Hashing model is trained to jointly preserve two kinds of similarities characterizing the two aspects respectively. Moreover, since images with both category and attribute labels are scarce, our model is carefully designed to leverage the abundant partially labelled data as training inputs to alleviate the risk of overfitting. With such a framework, the binary codes of new-coming images can be readily obtained by quantizing the outputs of a specific CNN layer, and different retrieval tasks can be achieved by using the binary codes in different ways. Experiments on two large-scale datasets show that our method achieves comparable or even better performance than those state-of-the-art methods specifically designed for each individual retrieval task while being more compact than the compared methods.