HyperSAX: Fast Approximate Search of Multidimensional Data

The increasing amount and size of data makes indexing and searching more difficult. It is especially challenging for multidimensional data such as images, videos, etc. In this paper we introduce a new indexable symbolic data representation that allows us to efficiently index and retrieve from a large amount of data that may appear in multiple dimensions. We use an approximate lower bounding distance measure to compute the distance between multidimensional arrays, which allows us to perform fast similarity searches. We present two search methods, exact and approximate, which can quickly retrieve data using our representation. Our approach is very general and works for many types of multidimensional data, including different types of image representations. Even for millions of multidimensional arrays, the approximate search will find a result in a few milliseconds, and will in many cases return a result similar to the best match.