Error Correcting Input and Output Hashing

Most learning-based hashing algorithms leverage sample-to-sample similarities, such as neighborhood structure, to generate binary codes, which achieve promising results for image retrieval. This type of methods are referred to as instance-level encoding. However, it is nontrivial to define a scalar to represent sample-to-sample similarity encoding the semantic labels and the data structure. To address this issue, in this paper, we seek to use a class-level encoding method, which encodes the class-to-class relationship, to take the semantic information of classes into consideration. Based on these two encodings, we propose a novel framework, error correcting input and output (EC-IO) coding, which does class-level and instance-level encoding under a unified mapping space. Our proposed model contains two major components, which are distribution preservation and error correction. With these two components, our model maps the input feature of samples and the output code of classes into a unified space to encode the intrinsic structure of data and semantic information of classes simultaneously. Under this framework, we present our hashing model, EC-IO hashing (EC-IOH), by approximating the mapping space with the Hamming space. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the retrieval performance, and EC-IOH exhibits superior and competitive performances comparing with popular supervised and unsupervised hashing methods.