K-Means Hashing: An Affinity-Preserving Quantization Method for Learning Binary Compact Codes

Kaiming He, Fang Wen, Jian Sun; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013, pp. 2938-2945

In computer vision there has been increasing interest in learning hashing codes whose Hamming distance approximates the data similarity. The hashing functions play roles in both quantizing the vector space and generating similarity-preserving codes. Most existing hashing methods use hyper-planes (or kernelized hyper-planes) to quantize and encode. In this paper, we present a hashing method adopting the k-means quantization. We propose a novel Affinity-Preserving K-means algorithm which simultaneously performs k-means clustering and learns the binary indices of the quantized cells. The distance between the cells is approximated by the Hamming distance of the cell indices. We further generalize our algorithm to a product space for learning longer codes. Experiments show our method, named as K-means Hashing (KMH), outperforms various state-of-the-art hashing encoding methods.