Deep Supervised Quantization by Self-Organizing Map

Min Wang, Wengang Zhou, Qi Tian, Junfu Pu, Houqiang Li

Abstract: Approximate Nearest Neighbour (ANN) search is an important research topic in multimedia and computer vision fields. In this paper, we propose a new deep supervised quantization method by Self-Organizing Map (SOM) to address this problem. Our method integrates the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Self-Organizing Map into a unified deep architecture. The overall training objective includes supervised quantization loss and classification loss. With the supervised quantization loss, we minimize the differences on the maps between similar image pairs, and maximize the differences on the maps between dissimilar image pairs. By optimization, the deep architecture can simultaneously extract deep features and quantize the features into the suitable nodes in the Self-Organizing Map. The experiments on several public standard datasets prove the superiority of our approach over the existing ANN search methods. Besides, as a byproduct, our deep architecture can be directly applied to classification task and visualization with little modification, and promising performances are demonstrated on these tasks in the experiments.