  Due to its low storage cost and fast query speed, hashing has been recognized
to accomplish similarity search in large-scale multimedia retrieval
applications. Particularly supervised hashing has recently received
considerable research attention by leveraging the label information to preserve
the pairwise similarities of data points in the Hamming space. However, there
still remain two crucial bottlenecks: 1) the learning process of the full
pairwise similarity preservation is computationally unaffordable and unscalable
to deal with big data; 2) the available category information of data are not
well-explored to learn discriminative hash functions. To overcome these
challenges, we propose a unified Semantic-Aware DIscrete Hashing (SADIH)
framework, which aims to directly embed the transformed semantic information
into the asymmetric similarity approximation and discriminative hashing
function learning. Specifically, a semantic-aware latent embedding is
introduced to asymmetrically preserve the full pairwise similarities while
skillfully handle the cumbersome n times n pairwise similarity matrix.
Meanwhile, a semantic-aware autoencoder is developed to jointly preserve the
data structures in the discriminative latent semantic space and perform data
reconstruction. Moreover, an efficient alternating optimization algorithm is
proposed to solve the resulting discrete optimization problem. Extensive
experimental results on multiple large-scale datasets demonstrate that our
SADIH can clearly outperform the state-of-the-art baselines with the additional
benefit of lower computational costs.
