Product quantization (PQ) has been recognized as a useful technique to encode visual feature vectors into compact codes to reduce both the storage and computation cost. Recent advances in retrieval and vision tasks indicate that high-dimensional descriptors are critical to ensuring high accuracy on large-scale data sets. However, optimizing PQ codes with high-dimensional data is extremely time-consuming and memory-consuming. To solve this problem, in this paper, we present a novel PQ method based on bilinear projection, which can well exploit the natural data structure and reduce the computational complexity. Specifically, we learn a global bilinear projection for PQ, where we provide both non-parametric and parametric solutions. The non-parametric solution does not need any data distribution assumption. The parametric solution can avoid the problem of local optima caused by random initialization, and enjoys a theoretical error bound. Besides, we further extend this approach by learning locally bilinear projections to fit underlying data distributions. We show by extensive experiments that our proposed method, dubbed bilinear optimization product quantization, achieves competitive retrieval and classification accuracies while having significant lower time and space complexities.