Fast supervised hashing with decision trees for high-dimensional data

Abstract

Supervised hashing aims to map the original features to compact binary codes that are able to preserve label based similarity in the Hamming space. Non-linear hash functions have demonstrated their advantage over linear ones due to their powerful generalization capability. In the literature, kernel functions are typically used to achieve non-linearity in hashing, which achieve encouraging retrieval performance at the price of slow evaluation and training time. Here we propose to use boosted decision trees for achieving non-linearity in hashing, which are fast to train and evaluate, hence more suitable for hashing with high dimensional data. In our approach, we first propose sub-modular formulations for the hashing binary code inference problem and an efficient GraphCut based block search method for solving large-scale inference. Then we learn hash functions by training boosted decision trees to fit the binary codes. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms most state-of-the-art methods in retrieval precision and training time. Especially for highdimensional data, our method is orders of magnitude faster than many methods in terms of training time.