Efficient indexing structures for fast media search and browsing

Fast media search and browsing is today a growing need to face the challenge of managing large collections of personal media. Traditional databases, (e.g. MySQL), or text databases (e.g. Lucene), do not address an important aspect of multimedia data: the high-dimensionality of data. In this paper, we describe the implementation and evaluation of high-dimensional data indexing structures for fast search and browsing. Index structures for high-dimensional data have been researched in the literature and several proposals exist in the literature. We compare five popular index structures on a large-scale image retrieval scenario with different visual features of varying dimensionality. Both indexing and search aspects are evaluated: indexing time, search time and the trade-off between precision and performance.