Semi-supervised multi-graph hashing for scalable similarity search

•A semi-supervised multi-graph hashing method is proposed for image search.•The different modalities are adaptively modulated by multi-graph learning approach.•Our hashing method integrates various modalities information with optimized weights.

Due to the explosive growth of the multimedia contents in recent years, scalable similarity search has attracted considerable attention in many large-scale multimedia applications. Among the different similarity search approaches, hashing based approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search has become very popular owing to its computational and storage efficiency. However, most of the existing hashing methods usually adopt a single modality or integrate multiple modalities simply without exploiting the effect of different features. To address the problem of learning compact hashing codes with multiple modality, we propose a semi-supervised Multi-Graph Hashing (MGH) framework in this paper. Different from the traditional methods, our approach can effectively integrate the multiple modalities with optimized weights in a multi-graph learning scheme. In this way, the effects of different modalities can be adaptively modulated. Besides, semi-supervised information is also incorporated into the unified framework and a sequential learning scheme is adopted to learn complementary hash functions. The proposed framework enables direct and fast handling for the query examples. Thus, the binary codes learned by our approach can be more effective for fast similarity search. Extensive experiments are conducted on two large public datasets to evaluate the performance of our approach and the results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves promising results compared to the state-of-the-art methods.