Effective and efficient indexing in cross-modal hashing-based datasets

To overcome the barrier of storage and computation, the hashing technique has been widely used for nearest neighbor search in multimedia retrieval applications recently. Particularly, cross-modal retrieval that searches across different modalities becomes an active but challenging problem. Although numerous of cross-modal hashing algorithms are proposed to yield compact binary codes, exhaustive search is impractical for large-scale datasets, and Hamming distance computation suffers inaccurate results. In this paper, we propose a novel search method that utilizes a probability-based index scheme over binary hash codes in cross-modal retrieval. The proposed indexing scheme employs a few binary bits from the hash code as the index code. We construct an inverted index table based on the index codes, and train a neural network for ranking and indexing to improve the retrieval accuracy. Experiments are performed on two benchmark datasets for retrieval across image and text modalities, where hash codes are generated and compared with several state-of-the-art cross-modal hashing methods. Results show the proposed method effectively boosts the performance on search accuracy, computation cost, and memory consumption in these datasets and hashing methods. The source code is available on https://github.com/msarawut/HCI.