A Method of Highspeed Similarity Retrieval based on Self-Organizing Maps

Feature-based similarity retrieval become an important research issue in image database systems. The features of image data are useful to discrimination of images. In this paper, we propose the highspeed k-Nearest Neighbor search algorithm based on Self-Organizing Maps. Self-Organizing Map(SOM) provides a mapping from high dimensional feature vectors onto a two-dimensional space. A topological feature map preserves the mutual relations (similarity) in feature spaces of input data, and clusters mutually similar feature vectors in a neighboring nodes. Each node of the topological feature map holds a node vector and similar images that is closest to each node vector. We implemented about k-NN search for similar image classification as to (1) access to topological feature map, and (2) apply to pruning strategy of high speed search. We experiment on the performance of our algorithm using color feature vectors extracted from images. Promising results have been obtained in experiments.