MLS³RDUH: Deep unsupervised hashing via manifold based local semantic similarity structure reconstructing

Most of the unsupervised hashing methods usually map images into semantic similarity-preserving hash codes by constructing local semantic similarity structure as guiding information, i.e., treating each point similar to its k nearest neighbours. However, for an image, some of its k nearest neighbours may be dissimilar to it, i.e., they are noisy datapoints which will damage the retrieval performance. Thus, to tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel deep unsupervised hashing method, called MLS³RDUH, which can reduce the noisy datapoints to further enhance retrieval performance. Specifically, the proposed method first defines a novel similarity matrix by utilising the intrinsic manifold structure in feature space and the cosine similarity of datapoints to reconstruct the local semantic similarity structure. Then a novel log-cosh hashing loss function is used to optimize the hashing network to generate compact hash codes by incorporating the defined similarity as guiding information. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.