Best bin first

Best bin first is a search algorithm that is designed to efficiently find an approximate solution to the nearest neighbor search problem in very-high-dimensional spaces. The algorithm is based on a variant of the kd-tree search algorithm which makes indexing higher-dimensional spaces possible. Best bin first is an approximate algorithm which returns the nearest neighbor for a large fraction of queries and a very close neighbor otherwise.^[1]

Differences from kd tree

• Backtracking is according to a priority queue based on closeness.
• Search a fixed number of nearest candidates and stop.
• A speedup of two orders of magnitude is typical.

References

1. Beis, J.; Lowe, D. G. (1997). Shape indexing using approximate nearest-neighbour search in high-dimensional spaces. Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. Puerto Rico. pp. 1000–1006. CiteSeerX: 10.1.1.23.9493.