Probabilistic attributed hashing

Due to the simplicity and efficiency, many hashing methods have recently been developed for large-scale similarity search. Most of the existing hashing methods focus on mapping low-level features to binary codes, but neglect attributes that are commonly associated with data samples. Attribute data, such as image tag, product brand, and user profile, can represent human recognition better than low-level features. However, attributes have specific characteristics, including high-dimensional, sparse and categorical properties, which is hardly leveraged into the existing hashing learning frameworks. In this paper, we propose a hashing learning framework, Probabilistic Attributed Hashing (PAH), to integrate attributes with low-level features. The connections between attributes and low-level features are built through sharing a common set of latent binary variables, i.e. hash codes, through which attributes and features can complement each other. Finally, we develop an efficient iterative learning algorithm, which is generally feasible for large-scale applications. Extensive experiments and comparison study are conducted on two public datasets, i.e., DBLP and NUS-WIDE. The results clearly demonstrate that the proposed PAH method substantially outperforms the peer methods.