RFHNet: Relational and Frequency-Aware Hashing Network for Large-Scale Fine-Grained Food Image Retrieval

摘要

Fine-grained food image retrieval is a key task in computational gastronomy, with applications in food traceability, dietary monitoring, and smart catering systems. Although hashing-based retrieval is attractive for large-scale search due to its storage efficiency and fast Hamming-distance computation, existing methods often perform poorly in fine-grained food scenarios, where subtle local semantics and frequency-sensitive visual cues are essential. To address this challenge, we propose RFHNet, a cascaded hierarchical hashing network that captures both global structure and fine-grained local details through multi-level representations. RFHNet includes three components: (1) Fine-grained Relation Modeling (FRM) to capture subtle visual differences among similar food components; (2) Multi-Frequency Modulated Fusion (MFMF) to extract informative multi-frequency features; and (3) Hierarchical Semantic Synergy (HSS) to adaptively integrate multi-level representations and generate discriminative hash codes. Experiments on six food-specific benchmarks show that RFHNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art hashing methods, with mAP gains of 4.44% to 17.20% at 12 bits. These results validate the effectiveness of RFHNet for large-scale visual food retrieval and smart catering applications. The source code will be released upon publication.

出版物
Proceedings of the 2026 International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval
闵巍庆
闵巍庆
副研究员
盛国瑞
盛国瑞
讲师
王丽丽
王丽丽
教授
蒋树强
蒋树强
研究员