Locality-Sensitive Hashing for Chi2 Distance

In the past 10 years, new powerful algorithms based on efficient data structures have been proposed to solve the problem of Nearest Neighbors search (or Approximate Nearest Neighbors search). If the Euclidean Locality Sensitive Hashing algorithm, which provides approximate nearest neighbors in a euclidean space with sublinear complexity, is probably the most popular, the euclidean metric does not always provide as accurate and as relevant results when considering similarity measure as the Earth-Mover Distance and χ² distances. In this paper, we present a new LSH scheme adapted to χ² distance for approximate nearest neighbors search in high-dimensional spaces. We define the specific hashing functions, we prove their local-sensitivity, and compare, through experiments, our method with the Euclidean Locality Sensitive Hashing algorithm in the context of image retrieval on real image databases. The results prove the relevance of such a new LSH scheme either providing far better accuracy in the context of image retrieval than euclidean scheme for an equivalent speed, or providing an equivalent accuracy but with a high gain in terms of processing speed.