A fast retrieval method for image features

With a very large size image database, there should be a way to search for the similar images efficiently. However, the traditional approaches that have been adopted to retrieve text or scalar values cannot be used because of the multi-dimensionality of the image feature vectors. A new retrieval method that uses one or more scalar values induced from the image vector is proposed. In the proposed method, the scalar values are independently stored as indices to the target feature vectors. With the proposed method, the searching speed is improved approximately 25 times compared to the sequential searching.