The SS+ tree: An improved index structure for similarity searches in a high-dimensional feature spaces

Ruth Kurniawati, Jesse Jin, John Shepherd

SPIE Conference on Storage and Retrieval for Image and Video Databases V, San Jose, California, February 1997.

(Compressed Postscript ... 401KB)


In this paper, we describe the SS+-tree, a tree structure for supporting similarity searches in a high-dimensional Euclidean space. Compared to the SS-tree, the tree uses a tighter bounding sphere for each node which is an approximation to the smallest enclosing sphere and it also makes a better use of the clustering property of the available data by using a variant of the $k$-means clustering algorithm as the split heuristic for its nodes. A local reorganization rule is also introduced during the tree building to reduce the overlapping between the nodes' bounding spheres.

Keys: High-dimensional indexing and retrieval, Similarity search, Multimedia databases, Enclosing spheres, Enclosing boxes (MBR)


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