On Large-scale Retrieval Binary Or N-ary Coding

Najibi Mahyar, Rastegari Mohammad, Davis Larry S.. Arxiv 2015

[Paper]    
ARXIV Image Retrieval Quantisation

The growing amount of data available in modern-day datasets makes the need to efficiently search and retrieve information. To make large-scale search feasible, Distance Estimation and Subset Indexing are the main approaches. Although binary coding has been popular for implementing both techniques, n-ary coding (known as Product Quantization) is also very effective for Distance Estimation. However, their relative performance has not been studied for Subset Indexing. We investigate whether binary or n-ary coding works better under different retrieval strategies. This leads to the design of a new n-ary coding method, “Linear Subspace Quantization (LSQ)” which, unlike other n-ary encoders, can be used as a similarity-preserving embedding. Experiments on image retrieval show that when Distance Estimation is used, n-ary LSQ outperforms other methods. However, when Subset Indexing is applied, interestingly, binary codings are more effective and binary LSQ achieves the best accuracy.

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