Embedded lattices tree: An efficient indexing scheme for content based retrieval on image databases

One of the challenges in the development of a content-based multimedia indexing and retrieval application is to achieve an efficient indexing scheme. To retrieve a particular image from a large scale image database, users can be frustrated by the long query times. Conventional indexing structures cannot usually cope with the presence of a large amount of feature vectors in high-dimensional space. This paper addresses such problems and presents a novel indexing technique, the embedded lattices tree, which is designed to bring an effective solution especially for realizing the trade off between the retrieval speed up and precision. The embedded lattices tree is based on a lattice vector quantization algorithm that divides the feature vectors progressively into smaller partitions using a finer scaling factor. The efficiency of the similarity queries is significantly improved by using the hierarchy and the good algebraic and geometric properties of the lattice. Furthermore, the dimensionality reduction that we perform on the feature vectors, translating from an upper level to a lower one of the embedded tree, reduces the complexity of measuring similarity between feature vectors. In addition, it enhances the performance on nearest neighbor queries especially for high dimensions. Our experimental results show that the retrieval speed is significantly improved and the indexing structure shows no sign of degradations when the database size is increased. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.