  Hashing has played a pivotal role in large-scale image retrieval. With the
development of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), hashing learning has shown
great promise. But existing methods are mostly tuned for classification, which
are not optimized for retrieval tasks, especially for instance-level retrieval.
In this study, we propose a novel hashing method for large-scale image
retrieval. Considering the difficulty in obtaining labeled datasets for image
retrieval task in large scale, we propose a novel CNN-based unsupervised
hashing method, namely Unsupervised Triplet Hashing (UTH). The unsupervised
hashing network is designed under the following three principles: 1) more
discriminative representations for image retrieval; 2) minimum quantization
loss between the original real-valued feature descriptors and the learned hash
codes; 3) maximum information entropy for the learned hash codes. Extensive
experiments on CIFAR-10, MNIST and In-shop datasets have shown that UTH
outperforms several state-of-the-art unsupervised hashing methods in terms of
retrieval accuracy.
