Semantic Disentanglement Adversarial Hashing for Cross-Modal Retrieval

Cross-modal hashing has gained considerable attention in cross-modal retrieval due to its low storage cost and prominent computational efficiency. However, preserving more semantic information in the compact hash codes to bridge the modality gap still remains challenging. Most existing methods unconsciously neglect the influence of modality-private information on semantic embedding discrimination, leading to unsatisfactory retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose a novel deep cross-modal hashing method, called Semantic Disentanglement Adversarial Hashing (SDAH), to tackle these challenges for cross-modal retrieval. Specifically, SDAH is designed to decouple the original features of each modality into modality-common features with semantic information and modality-private features with disturbing information. After the preliminary decoupling, the modality-private features are shuffled and treated as positive interactions to enhance the learning of modality-common features, which can significantly boost the discriminative and robustness of semantic embeddings. Moreover, the variational information bottleneck is introduced in the hash feature learning process, which can avoid the loss of a large amount of semantic information caused by the high-dimensional feature compression. Finally, the discriminative and compact hash codes can be computed directly from the hash features. A large number of comparative and ablation experiments show that SDAH achieves superior performance than other state-of-the-art methods.