NV-Tree: nearest neighbors at the billion scale

This paper presents the NV-Tree (Nearest Vector Tree). It addresses the specific, yet important, problem of efficiently and effectively finding the approximate k-nearest neighbors within a collection of a few billion high-dimensional data points. The NV-Tree is a very compact index, as only six bytes are kept in the index for each high-dimensional descriptor. It thus scales extremely well when indexing large collections of high-dimensional descriptors. The NV-Tree efficiently produces results of good quality, even at such a large scale that the indices cannot be kept entirely in main memory any more. We demonstrate this with extensive experiments using a collection of 2.5 billion SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) descriptors.