Abstract

Abstract. Binary codes have been widely used in vision problems as a compact feature representation to achieve both space and time advan-tages. Various methods have been proposed to learn data-dependent hash functions which map a feature vector to a binary code. However, con-siderable data information is inevitably lost during the binarization step which also causes ambiguity in measuring sample similarity using Ham-ming distance. Besides, the learned hash functions cannot be changed af-ter training, which makes them incapable of adapting to new data outside the training data set. To address both issues, in this paper we propose a flexible bitwise weight learning framework based on the binary codes ob-tained by state-of-the-art hashing methods, and incorporate the learned weights into the weighted Hamming distance computation. We then for-mulate the proposed framework as a ranking problem and leverage the Ranking SVM model to offline tackle the weight learning. The frame-work is further extended to an online mode which updates the weights at each time new data comes, thereby making it scalable to large and dy-namic data sets. Extensive experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains of using binary codes with bitwise weighting in image retrieval tasks. It is appealing that the online weight learning leads to comparable accuracy with its offline counterpart, which thus makes our approach practical for realistic applications.