Deep Fuzzy Hashing Network for Efficient Image Retrieval

Hashing methods for efficient image retrieval aim at learning hash functions that map similar images to semantically correlated binary codes in the Hamming space with similarity well preserved. The traditional hashing methods usually represent image content by hand-crafted features. Deep hashing methods based on deep neural network (DNN) architectures can generate more effective image features and obtain better retrieval performance. However, the underlying data structure is hardly captured by existing DNN models. Moreover, the similarity (either visually or semantically) between pairwise images is ambiguous, even uncertain, to be measured in the existing deep hashing methods. In this article, we propose a novel hashing method termed deep fuzzy hashing network (DFHN) to overcome the shortcomings of existing deep hashing approaches. Our DFHN method combines the fuzzy logic technique and the DNN to learn more effective binary codes, which can leverage fuzzy rules to model the uncertainties underlying the data. Derived from fuzzy logic theory, the generalized hamming distance is devised in the convolutional layers and fully connected layers in our DFHN to model their outputs, which come from an efficient xor operation on given inputs and weights. Extensive experiments show that our DFHN method obtains competitive retrieval accuracy with highly efficient training speed compared with several state-of-the-art deep hashing approaches on two large-scale image datasets: CIFAR-10 and NUS-WIDE.