  Learning-based hashing methods are widely used for nearest neighbor
retrieval, and recently, online hashing methods have demonstrated good
performance-complexity trade-offs by learning hash functions from streaming
data. In this paper, we first address a key challenge for online hashing: the
binary codes for indexed data must be recomputed to keep pace with updates to
the hash functions. We propose an efficient quality measure for hash functions,
based on an information-theoretic quantity, mutual information, and use it
successfully as a criterion to eliminate unnecessary hash table updates. Next,
we also show how to optimize the mutual information objective using stochastic
gradient descent. We thus develop a novel hashing method, MIHash, that can be
used in both online and batch settings. Experiments on image retrieval
benchmarks (including a 2.5M image dataset) confirm the effectiveness of our
formulation, both in reducing hash table recomputations and in learning
high-quality hash functions.
