Dimensionality Reduced Clustered Data and Order Partition and Stepwise Dimensionality Increasing Indices

One of the goals of NASA funded project at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center was to build an index for similarity searching satellite images, which were characterized by high-dimensional feature image texture vectors. Reviewed is our effort on data clustering, dimensionality reduction via Singular Value Decomposition - SVD and indexing to build a smaller index and more efficient k-Nearest Neighbor - k-NN query processing for similarity search. k-NN queries based on scanning of the feature vectors of all images is obviously too costly for ever-increasing number of images. The ubiquitous multidimensional R-tree index and its extensions were not an option given their limited scalability dimension-wise. The cost of processing k-NN queries was further reduced by building memory resident Ordered Partition indices on dimensionality reduced clusters. Further research in a university setting included the following: (1) Clustered SVD was extended to yield exact k-NN queries by issuing appropriate less costly range queries, (2) Stepwise Dimensionality Increasing - SDI index outperformed other known indices, (3) selection of optimal number of dimensions to reduce query processing cost, (4) two methods to make the OP-trees persistent and loadable as a single file access.