Abstract Deep network based cross-modal retrieval has recently made significant progress. However, bridging modality gap to further enhance the retrieval accuracy still remains a crucial bottleneck. In this paper, we propose a Graph Convolutional Hashing (GCH) approach, which learns modality-unified binary codes via an affinity graph. An end-to-end deep architecture is constructed with three main components: a semantic encoder module, two feature encoding networks, and a graph convolutional network (GCN). We design a semantic encoder as a teacher module to guide the feature encoding process, a.k.a. student module, for semantic information exploiting. Furthermore, GCN is utilized to explore the inherent similarity structure among data points, which will help to generate discriminative hash codes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed GCH outperforms the state-of-the-art methods