Deep Saliency Hashing

In recent years, hashing methods have been proved efficient for large-scale Web media search. However, existing general hashing methods have limited discriminative power for describing fine-grained objects that share similar overall appearance but have subtle difference. To solve this problem, we for the first time introduce attention mechanism to the learning of hashing codes. Specifically, we propose a novel deep hashing model, named deep saliency hashing (DSaH), which automatically mines salient regions and learns semantic-preserving hashing codes simultaneously. DSaH is a two-step end-to-end model consisting of an attention network and a hashing network. Our loss function contains three basic components, including the semantic loss, the saliency loss, and the quantization loss. The saliency loss guides the attention network to mine discriminative regions from pairs of images. We conduct extensive experiments on both fine-grained and general retrieval datasets for performance evaluation. Experimental results on Oxford Flowers-17 and Stanford Dogs-120 demonstrate that our DSaH performs the best for fine-grained retrieval task and beats the existing best retrieval performance (DPSH) by approximately 12%. DSaH also outperforms several state-of-the-art hashing methods on general datasets, including CIFAR-10 and NUS-WIDE.