Deep disentangled hashing with momentum triplets for neuroimage search

Neuroimaging has been widely used in computer-aided clinical diagnosis and treatment, and the rapid increase of neuroimage repositories introduces great challenges for efficient neuroimage search. Existing image search methods often use triplet loss to capture high-order relationships between samples. However, we find that the traditional triplet loss is difficult to pull positive and negative sample pairs to make their Hamming distance discrepancies larger than a small fixed value. This may reduce the discriminative ability of learned hash code and degrade the performance of image search. To address this issue, in this work, we propose a deep disentangled momentum hashing (DDMH) framework for neuroimage search. Specifically, we first investigate the original triplet loss and find that this loss function can be determined by the inner product of hash code pairs. Accordingly, we disentangle hash code norms and hash code directions and analyze the role of each part. By decoupling the loss function from the hash code norm, we propose a unique disentangled triplet loss, which can effectively push positive and negative sample pairs by desired Hamming distance discrepancies for hash codes with different lengths. We further develop a momentum triplet strategy to address the problem of insufficient triplet samples caused by small batch-size for 3D neuroimages. With the proposed disentangled triplet loss and the momentum triplet strategy, we design an end-to-end trainable deep hashing framework for neuroimage search. Comprehensive empirical evidence on three neuroimage datasets shows that DDMH has better performance in neuroimage search compared to several state-of-the-art methods.