A fast indexing method for multidimensional nearest-neighbor search

John Shepherd, Xiaoming Zhu, Nimrod Megiddo

SPIE Conference on Storage and Retrieval for Image and Video Databases VI, San Jose, California, January 1999

(Compressed Postscript ... 58KB)


This paper describes a snapshot of work in progress on the development of an efficient file-access method for similarity searching in high-dimensional vector spaces. This method has applications in, for example, image databases where images are accessed via high-dimensional feature vectors. The technique is based on using a collection of space-filling curves as an auxiliary indexing structure. Initial performance analyses suggest that the method works efficiently in moderately high-dimensional spaces (256 dimensions), with tolerable storage and execution-time overhead.

(The work reported here was performed while John Shepherd was on study leave at the IBM Almaden Research Center.)

Keys: content-based image retrieval, k-nearest-neighbours search, high-dimensional indexing, space-filling curves


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