Improved Deep Unsupervised Hashing via Prototypical Learning

Hashing has become increasingly popular in approximate nearest neighbor search in recent years due to its storage and computational efficiency. While deep unsupervised hashing has shown encouraging performance recently, its efficacy in the more realistic unsupervised situation is far from satisfactory due to two limitations. On one hand, they usually neglect the underlying global semantic structure in the deep feature space. On the other hand, they also ignore reconstructing the global structure in the hash code space. In this research, we develop a simple yet effective approach named deeP U nsupeR vised hashing via P rototypical LEarning. Specifically, introduces both feature prototypes and hashing prototypes to model the underlying semantic structures of the images in both deep feature space and hash code space. Then we impose a smoothness constraint to regularize the consistency of the global structures in two spaces through our semantic prototypical consistency learning. Moreover, our method encourages the prototypical consistency for different augmentations of each image via contrastive prototypical consistency learning. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed performs better than a variety of state-of-the-art retrieval methods.