  Deep supervised hashing has emerged as an influential solution to large-scale
semantic image retrieval problems in computer vision. In the light of recent
progress, convolutional neural network based hashing methods typically seek
pair-wise or triplet labels to conduct the similarity preserving learning.
However, complex semantic concepts of visual contents are hard to capture by
similar/dissimilar labels, which limits the retrieval performance. Generally,
pair-wise or triplet losses not only suffer from expensive training costs but
also lack in extracting sufficient semantic information. In this regard, we
propose a novel deep supervised hashing model to learn more compact class-level
similarity preserving binary codes. Our deep learning based model is motivated
by deep metric learning that directly takes semantic labels as supervised
information in training and generates corresponding discriminant hashing code.
Specifically, a novel cubic constraint loss function based on Gaussian
distribution is proposed, which preserves semantic variations while penalizes
the overlap part of different classes in the embedding space. To address the
discrete optimization problem introduced by binary codes, a two-step
optimization strategy is proposed to provide efficient training and avoid the
problem of gradient vanishing. Extensive experiments on four large-scale
benchmark databases show that our model can achieve the state-of-the-art
retrieval performance. Moreover, when training samples are limited, our method
surpasses other supervised deep hashing methods with non-negligible margins.
