Sim-min-hash: an efficient matching technique for linking large image collections

One of the most successful method to link all similar images within a large collection is min-Hash, which is a way to significantly speed-up the comparison of images when the underlying image representation is bag-of-words. However, the quantization step of min-Hash introduces important information loss. In this paper, we propose a generalization of min-Hash, called Sim-min-Hash, to compare sets of real-valued vectors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach when combined with the Hamming embedding similarity. Experiments on large-scale popular benchmarks demonstrate that Sim-min-Hash is more accurate and faster than min-Hash for similar image search. Linking a collection of one million images described by 2 billion local descriptors is done in 7 minutes on a single core machine.