Characteristics Matching Based Hash Codes Generation for Efficient Fine-grained Image Retrieval

The rapidly growing scale of data in practice poses demands on the efficiency of retrieval models. However for fine-grained image retrieval task there are inherent contradictions in the design of hashing based efficient models. Firstly the limited information embedding capacity of low-dimensional binary hash codes coupled with the detailed information required to describe fine-grained categories results in a contradiction in feature learning. Secondly there is also a contradiction between the complexity of fine-grained feature extraction models and retrieval efficiency. To address these issues in this paper we propose the characteristics matching based hash codes generation method. Coupled with the cross-layer semantic information transfer module and the multi-region feature embedding module the proposed method can generate hash codes that effectively capture fine-grained differences among samples while ensuring efficient inference. Extensive experiments on widely used datasets demonstrate that our method can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods.