Processing a multimedia join through the method of nearest neighbor search

Commonly used content-retrieval systems focus on the problem of finding the nearest neighbor (NNsearch) for a given single query object out of a database of media objects [1]. However, there are only few attempts [2,3] that realize join operations on two multimedia tables, where the multimedia data components are represented by their respective feature vectors. The necessity of using multimedia joins in a variety of applications is the motivation behind this search for a more efficient and more general purpose method of performing a join on multimedia tables. In this perspective, the goal of this paper is to introduce an efficient implementation of such a multimedia join using the method of NN-search. The problem is naturally related to the NN-search for a single query object which suggests a straightforward nested-loop implementation. We will show that this implementation can be considerably improved by extending the notion of a query object to a query-sphere (Section 3). Finally we will demonstrate experimentally that our