Shape Indexing Using Approximate Nearest-Neighbour Search in High-Dimensional Spaces

  • Authors:
  • Jeffrey S. Beis;David G. Lowe

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • CVPR '97 Proceedings of the 1997 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR '97)
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

Shape indexing is a way of making rapid associations between features detected in an image and object models that could have produced them. When model databases are large, the use of high-dimensional features is critical, due to the improved level of discrimination they can provide. Unfortunately, finding the nearest neighbour to a query point rapidly becomes inefficient as the dimensionality of the feature space increases. Past indexing methods have used hash tables for hypothesis recovery, but only in low-dimensional situations. In this paper, we show that a new variant of the k-d tree search algorithm makes indexing in higher-dimensional spaces practical. This Best Bin First, or BBF, search is an approximate algorithm which finds the nearest neighbour for a large fraction of the queries, and a very close neighbour in the remaining cases. The technique has been integrated into a fully developed recognition system, which is able to detect complex objects in real, cluttered scenes in just a few seconds.