Clustering-driven unsupervised deep hashing for image retrieval

Abstract Unsupervised deep hash functions are complicated due to the challenges of learning discriminative clusters and the absence of similarity-sensitive objectives. Existing approaches predominately handle these challenges independently, while neglecting the fact that cluster centroids and similarity-sensitive binary codes are correlated and can be learned simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep framework for image retrieval, namely Clustering-driven Unsupervised Deep Hashing (CUDH), to recursively learn discriminative clusters by soft clustering model and produce binary code with high similarity responds. We employ the aggregated clusters as an auxiliary distribution to generate hashing codes. With imposing binary constraints loss and reconstruction loss of auto-encoder, our CUDH can be jointly optimized by standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Comprehensive experiments on three popular datasets are conducted and the results show that our CUDH can outperform the state-of-the-art methods by large margins.