Composite Quantization for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

This paper presents a novel compact coding approach, composite quantization, for approximate nearest neighbor search. The idea is to use the composition of several elements selected from the dictionaries to accurately approximate a vector and to represent the vector by a short code composed of the indices of the selected elements. To efficiently compute the approximate distance of a query to a database vector using the short code, we introduce an extra constraint, constant inter-dictionary-element-product, resulting in that approximating the distance only using the distance of the query to each selected element is enough for nearest neighbor search. Experimental comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms over several benchmark datasets demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed approach.