Tertiary hash tree: Indexing structure for content-based image retrieval

Dominant features for content-based image retrieval usually consist of high-dimensional values. So far, many researches have been done to index such values for fast retrieval. Still, many existing indexing schemes are suffering from performance degradation due to the curse of dimensionality problem. As an alternative, heuristic algorithms have been proposed to calculate the result with 'high probability' at the cost of accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new hash tree-based indexing structure called tertiary hash tree for indexing high-dimensional feature values. Tertiary hash tree provides several advantages compared to the traditional extendible hash structure in terms of resource usage and search performance. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed index structure achieves outstanding performance.