Computationally Bounded Retrieval

The increase in size of large image databases makes the problem of efficient retrieval extremely challenging. This is especially true in the case of high dimensional data where even operations like hashing become expensive because of costly projection operators. Unlike most hashing methods that sacrifice accuracy for speed, we propose a novel method that improves the speed of high dimensional image retrieval by several orders of magnitude without any significant drop in performance. To do this, we propose to learn computationally bounded sparse projections for the encoding step. To further increase the accuracy of the method, we add an orthogonality constraint on projections to reduce bit correlation. We then introduce an iterative scheme that jointly optimizes this objective, which helps us obtain fast and efficient projections. We demonstrate this technique on large retrieval databases, specifically ImageNET, GIST1M and SUN-attribute for the task of nearest neighbor retrieval, and show that our method achieves a speed-up of up to a factor of 100 over state-of-the-art methods, while having on-par and in some cases even better accuracy.