BoostMap: A Method for Efficient Approximate Similarity Rankings

This paper introduces BoostMap, a method that can significantly reduce retrieval time in image and video database systems that employ computationally expensive distance measures, metric or non-metric. Database and query objects are embedded into a Euclidean space, in which similarities can be rapidly measured using a weighted Manhattan distance. Embedding construction is formulated as a machine learning task, where AdaBoost is used to combine many simple, 1D embeddings into a multidimensional embedding that preserves a significant amount of the proximity structure in the original space. Performance is evaluated in a hand pose estimation system, and a dynamic gesture recognition system, where the proposed method is used to retrieve approximate nearest neighbors under expensive image and video similarity measures. In both systems, in quantitative experiments, BoostMap significantly increases efficiency, with minimal losses in accuracy. Moreover, the experiments indicate that BoostMap co...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Vassilis Athitsos, Jonathan Alon, Stan Sclaroff, George Kollios
• Keywords: Approximate Nearest Neighbors, Computer Vision, CVPR 2004, Expensive Distance Measures, Multidimensional Embedding, Video Similarity Measures, Weighted Manhattan Distance