The nearest neighbor problem is the following: Given a set of n points P = fp 1 ; : : : ; png in some metric space X, preprocess P so as to efficiently answer queries which require finding the point in P closest to a query point q 2 X. We focus on the particularly interesting case of the d-dimensional Euclidean space where X = ! d under some l p norm. Despite decades of effort, the current solutions are far from satisfactory; in fact, for large d, in theory or in practice, they provide little improvement over the brute-force algorithm which compares the query point to each data point. Of late, there has been some interest in the approximate nearest neighbors problem, which is: Find a point p 2 P that is an ffl-approximate nearest neighbor of the query q in that for all p 0 2 P , d(p; q) (1 + ffl)d(p 0 ; q). We present two algorithmic results for the approximate version that significantly improve the known bounds: (a) preprocessing cost polynomial in n and d, and a trul...

The problem of searching the elements of a set which are close to a given query element under some similarity criterion has a vast number of applications in many branches of computer science, from pattern recognition to textual and multimedia information retrieval. We are interested in the rather general case where the similarity criterion defines a metric space, instead of the more restricted case of a vector space. A large number of solutions have been proposed in different areas, in many cases without cross-knowledge. Because of this, the same ideas have been reinvented several times, and very different presentations have been given for the same approaches. We

Two different techniques of browsing through a collection of spatial objects stored in an R-tree spatial data structure on the basis of their distances from an arbitrary spatial query object are compared. The conventional approach is one that makes use of a k-nearest neighbor algorithm where k is known prior to the invocation of the algorithm. Thus if m#kneighbors are needed, the k-nearest neighbor algorithm needs to be reinvoked for m neighbors, thereby possibly performing some redundant computations. The second approach is incremental in the sense that having obtained the k nearest neighbors, the k +1 st neighbor can be obtained without having to calculate the k +1nearest neighbors from scratch. The incremental approach finds use when processing complex queries where one of the conditions involves spatial proximity (e.g., the nearest city to Chicago with population greater than a million), in which case a query engine can make use of a pipelined strategy. A general incremental nearest neighbor algorithm is presented that is applicable to a large class of hierarchical spatial data structures. This algorithm is adapted to the R-tree and its performance is compared to an existing k-nearest neighbor algorithm for R-trees [45]. Experiments show that the incremental nearest neighbor algorithm significantly outperforms the k-nearest neighbor algorithm for distance browsing queries in a spatial database that uses the R-tree as a spatial index. Moreover, the incremental nearest neighbor algorithm also usually outperforms the k-nearest neighbor algorithm when applied to the k-nearest neighbor problem for the R-tree, although the improvement is not nearly as large as for distance browsing queries. In fact, we prove informally that, at any step in its execution, the incremental...

We consider the computational problem of finding nearest neighbors in general metric spaces. Of particular interest are spaces that may not be conveniently embedded or approximated in Euclidian space, or where the dimensionality of a Euclidian representation is very high. Also relevant are high-dimensional Euclidian settings in which the distribution of data is in some sense of lower dimension and embedded in the space. The vp-tree (vantage point tree) is introduced in several forms, together with associated algorithms, as an improved method for these difficult search problems. Tree construction executes in O(n log(n)) time, and search is under certain circumstances and in the limit, O(log(n)) expected time. The theoretical basis for this approach is developed and the results of several experiments are reported. In Euclidian cases, kd-tree performance is compared.

Most research on nearest neighbor algorithms in the literature has been focused on the Euclidean case. In many practical search problems however, the underlying metric is non-Euclidean. Nearest neighbor algorithms for general metric spaces are quite weak, which motivates a search for other classes of metric spaces that can be tractably searched.

Similarity search is a very important operation in multimedia databases and other database applications involving complex objects, and involves finding objects in a data set S similar to a query object q, based on some similarity measure. In this article, we focus on methods for similarity search that make the general assumption that similarity is represented with a distance metric d. Existing methods for handling similarity search in this setting typically fall into one of two classes. The first directly indexes the objects based on distances (distance-based indexing), while the second is based on mapping to a vector space (mapping-based approach). The main part of this article is dedicated to a survey of distance-based indexing methods, but we also briefly outline how search occurs in mapping-based methods. We also present a general framework for performing search based on distances, and present algorithms for common types of queries that operate on an arbitrary “search hierarchy. ” These algorithms can be applied on each of the methods presented, provided a suitable search hierarchy is defined.

In many database applications, one of the common queries is to find approximate matches to a given query item from a collection of data items. For example, given an image database, one may want to retrieve all images that are similar to a given query image. Distance based index structures are proposed for applications where the data domain is high dimensional, or the distance function used to compute distances between data objects is non-Euclidean. In this paper, we introduce a distance based index structure called multi-vantage point (mvp) tree for similarity queries on high-dimensional metric spaces. The mvptree uses more than one vantage point to partition the space into spherical cuts at each level. It also utilizes the pre-computed (at construction time) distances between the data points and the vantage points. We have done experiments to compare mvp-trees with vp-trees which have a similar partitioning strategy, but use only one vantage point at each level, and do not make use of the pre-computed distances. Empirical studies show that mvptree outperforms the vp-tree 20 % to 80 % for varying query ranges and different distance distributions. 1.

Motion correspondence is a fundamental problem in computer vision and many other disciplines. This article describes statistical data association techniques originally developed in the context of target tracking and surveillance and now beginning to be used in dynamic motion analysis by the computer vision community. The Mahalanobis distance measure is first introduced before discussing the limitations of nearest neighbor algorithms. Then, the track-splitting, joint likelihood, multiple hypothesis algorithms are described, each method solving an increasing-ly more complicated optimization. Real-time constraints may prohibit the application of these optimal methods. The suboptimal joint probabilistic data association algorithm is therefore described. The advantages, limitations, and relationships between the approaches are discussed. 1

Given a set S of n sites (points), and a distance measure d, the nearest neighbor searching problem is to build a data structure so that given a query point q, the site nearest to q can be found quickly. This paper gives data structures for this problem when the sites and queries are in a metric space. One data structure, D(S), uses a divide-and-conquer recursion. The other data structure, M(S, Q), is somewhat like a skiplist. Both are simple and implementable. The data structures are analyzed when the metric space obeys a certain sphere-packing bound, and when the sites and query points are random and have distributions with an exchangeability property. This property implies, for example, that query point q is a random element of S ∪ {q}. Under these conditions, the preprocessing and space bounds for the algorithms are close to linear in n. They depend also on the sphere-packing bound, and on the logarithm of the distance ratio Υ(S) of S, the ratio of the distance between the farthest pair of points in S to the distance between the closest pair. The data structure M(S, Q) requires as input data an additional set Q, taken to be representative of the query points. The resource bounds of M(S, Q) have a dependence on the distance ratio of S ∪ Q. While M(S, Q) can return wrong answers, its failure probability can be bounded, and is decreasing in a parameter K. Here K ≤ |Q|/n is chosen when building M(S, Q). The expected query time for M(S, Q) is O(K log n) log Υ(S ∪ Q), and the resource bounds increase linearly in K. The data structure D(S) has expected O(log n) O(1) query time, for fixed distance ratio. The preprocessing algorithm for M(S, Q) can be used to solve the all-nearest-neighbor problem for S in O(n(log n) 2 (log Υ(S)) 2) expected time. 1

Abstract—We present a novel approach to finding a correspondence (alignment) between two curves. The correspondence is based on a notion of an alignment curve which treats both curves symmetrically. We then define a similarity metric based on the alignment curve using two intrinsic properties of the curve, namely, length and curvature. The optimal correspondence is found by an efficient dynamic-programming method both for aligning pairs of curve segments and pairs of closed curves, and is effective in the presence of a variety of transformations of the curve. Finally, the correspondence is shown in application to handwritten character recognition, prototype formation, and object recognition, and is potentially useful in other applications such as registration and tracking. Index Terms—Curve alignment, recognition, dynamic programming, prototypes, correspondence.