Dynamic Masking and Auxiliary Hash Learning for Enhanced Cross-Modal Retrieval

The demand for multimodal data processing drives the development of information technology. Cross-modal hash retrieval has attracted much attention because it can overcome modal differences and achieve efficient retrieval, and has shown great application potential in many practical scenarios. Existing cross-modal hashing methods have difficulties in fully capturing the semantic information of different modal data, which leads to a significant semantic gap between modalities. Moreover, these methods often ignore the importance differences of channels, and due to the limitation of a single goal, the matching effect between hash codes is also affected to a certain extent, thus facing many challenges. To address these issues, we propose a Dynamic Masking and Auxiliary Hash Learning (AHLR) method for enhanced cross-modal retrieval. By jointly leveraging the dynamic masking and auxiliary hash learning mechanisms, our approach effectively resolves the problems of channel information imbalance and insufficient key information capture, thereby significantly improving the retrieval accuracy. Specifically, we introduce a dynamic masking mechanism that automatically screens and weights the key information in images and texts during the training process, enhancing the accuracy of feature matching. We further construct an auxiliary hash layer to adaptively balance the weights of features across each channel, compensating for the deficiencies of traditional methods in key information capture and channel processing. In addition, we design a contrastive loss function to optimize the generation of hash codes and enhance their discriminative power, further improving the performance of cross-modal retrieval. Comprehensive experimental results on NUS-WIDE, MIRFlickr-25K and MS-COCO benchmark datasets show that the proposed AHLR algorithm outperforms several existing algorithms.