L-signature quadratic form distance for efficient query processing in very large multimedia databases

The highly increasing amount of multimedia data leads to extremely growing databases which support users in searching and exploring the database contents. Content-based searching for similar objects inside such vivid and voluminous multimedia databases is typically accompanied by an immense amount of costly similarity computations among the stored data objects. In order to process similarity computations arising in content-based similarity queries efficiently, we present the L -Signature Quadratic Form Distance which maintains high retrieval quality and improves the computation time of the Signature Quadratic Form Distance by more than one order of magnitude. As a result, we process millions of similarity computations in less than a few seconds. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.