2010 Research Summary

Hashing Algorithms for Scalable Image Search

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Brian Kulis¹ and Trevor Darrell

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

A common problem in large-scale data is that of quickly extracting nearest neighbors to a query from a large database. In computer vision, for example, this problem arises in content-based image retrieval, 3-d image reconstructions, human body pose estimation, object recognition problems, and other problems. This project focuses on developing algorithms for quickly and accurately performing large-scale image searches using hashing techniques. Some particular contributions include incorporating hashing methods for learned metrics as well as for performing locality-sensitive hashing over arbitrary kernel functions, two prominent scenarios arising in modern computer vision applications. Recent work has aimed to learn appropriate hash functions for a given image search task in order to minimize the memory overhead required for accurate searches. We have applied our algorithms to several large-scale data sets including the 80 million images of the Tiny Image data set and other large content-based image retrieval data sets.

Figure 1: Indexing scheme for efficient image search

[1]

http://nips.cc/Conferences/2009/Program/event.php?ID=1881

¹Postdoc, EECS