• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
• /
• v.8D no.5
• /
• pp.507-512
• /
• 2001

Feature-based similarity has become an important research issue in multimedia database systems. The features of multimedia data are useful for discriminating between multimedia objects. the performance of conventional multidimensional data structures tends to deteriorate as the number of dimensions of feature vectors increase. The $R^{*}-Tree$ is the most successful variant of the R-Tree. In this paper, we propose a SOM-based $R^{*}-Tree$ as a new indexing method for high-dimensional feature vectors. The SOM-based $R^{*}-Tree$ combines SOM and $R^{*}-Tree$ to achieve search performance more scalable to high-dimensionalties. Self-Organizingf Maps (SOMs) provide mapping from high-dimensional feature vectors onto a two-dimensional space. The map is called a topological feature map, and preserves the mutual relationships (similarity) in the feature spaces of input data, clustering mutually similar feature vectors in neighboring nodes. Each node of the topological feature map holds a codebook vector. We experimentally compare the retrieval time cost of a SOM-based $R^{*}-Tree$ with of an SOM and $R^{*}-Tree$ using color feature vectors extracted from 40,000 images. The results show that the SOM-based $R^{*}-Tree$ outperform both the SOM and $R^{*}-Tree$ due to reduction of the number of nodes to build $R^{*}-Tree$ and retrieval time cost.