Efficient similarity search on multidimensional space of biometric databases

Abstract

Abstract The problem of pursuing the data items of a large database whose distances to a query item are the least is known as Similarity Search (Nearest Neighbor Search) problem. There exist various algorithms to address this problem. Some of the well known algorithms are i) exact algorithms ii) approximation algorithms and iii) randomized algorithms. This paper has made study only on exact and approximation algorithms because randomized algorithm produces approximate results with some probability. Recently, there are several approximation algorithms are proposed by the researchers because this type of algorithms minimizes the problem of Curse of Dimensionality. This paper mainly has two major sections. In first section, various methods under exact and approximation algorithms are discussed with regard to storage, preprocessing and query time. In the second section, efficient algorithms for similarity search suitable for certain physiological characteristics based biometric systems are considered. Biometric system has five main steps viz acquisition of Image, pre-processing, extraction of features, matching and making final decision. In this paper, indexing algorithms for similarity search suitable for iris trait based on different features are discussed in detail. Since the nature of features are distinct and different in biometric traits, there does not exist a universal (one unique) solution which can apply to all traits of biometric systems. Various performance measures like Penetration Rate and Hit Rate are used to determine the correct recognition rate with top best match (rank-1 accuracy).