Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search by Residual Vector Quantization.docVIP

Sensors 2010, 10, 11259-11273; doi:10.3390/s101211259 OPEN ACCESS sensors ISSN 1424-8220 /journal/sensors Article Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search by Residual Vector Quantization Yongjian Chen 1, Tao Guan 2,* and Cheng Wang 1 1 Digital Engineering Simulation Research Center, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China; E-Mails: wangch@ (Y.C.); chyojn@ (C.W.) 2 School of Computer Science Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, No.1037 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430074, China * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: qd_gt@126.com. Received: 9 October 2010; in revised form: 20 November 2010 / Accepted: 7 December 2010 / Published: 8 December 2010 Abstract: A recently proposed product quantization method is efficient for large scale approximate nearest neighbor search, however, its performance on unstructured vectors is limited. This paper introduces residual vector quantization based approaches that are appropriate for unstructured vectors. Database vectors are quantized by residual vector quantizer. The reproductions are represented by short codes composed of their quantization indices. Euclidean distance between query vector and database vector is approximated by asymmetric distance, i.e., the distance between the query vector and the reproduction of the database vector. An efficient exhaustive search approach is proposed by fast computing the asymmetric distance. A straight forward non-exhaustive search approach is proposed for large scale search. Our approaches are compared to two state-of-the-art methods, spectral hashing and product quantization, on both structured and unstructured datasets. Results show that our approaches obtain the best results in terms of the trade-off between search quality and memory usage. Keywords: approximate nearest neighbor search; high-dimensional indexing; residual vector quantization  Sensors 2010, 10 11260 1.