Learning to hash based on angularly discriminative embedding

Hashing, a widely-studied tool to the approximate nearest neighbor search, aims to embed samples as compact binary representations. Current approaches to this issue generally seek a low-dimensional Hamming Space where representations are discrete and have smaller intra-class distance and larger inter-class distance. As a result, the performance is often limited by the discrete constraint. In this work, we propose to seek an angularly discriminative Embedding Space where representations are continuous and have smaller intra-class angular margin and larger inter-class angular margin. For our goal is to learn continuous representations rather than discrete hash codes, the problems caused by discrete constraint can be avoided. Besides, in order to further reduce the gap between Embedding Space and Hamming Space, we introduce an additional coordinate-constraint for representations. Our method is simple yet effective. Extensive experiments on the image retrieval task show that it achieves encouraging results on four benchmark datasets. Furthermore, the success of our proposed method demonstrates that leveraging the progress made in representation learning to improve hashing is promising in future.