Similarity search with implicit object features

Abstract

Driven by many real applications, in this paper we study the problem of similarity search with implicit object features; that is, the features of each object are not pre-computed/evaluated. As the existing similarity search techniques are not applicable, a novel and efficient algorithm is developed in this paper to approach the problem. The R-tree based algorithm consists of two steps: feature evaluation and similarity search. Our performance evaluation demonstrates that the algorithm is very efficient for large spatial datasets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.