Abstract
An important research issue in multimedia databases is the retrieval of similar objects. For most applications in multimedia databases, an exact search is not meaningful.
Thus, much effort has been devoted to develop efficient and effective similarity search techniques. A recent approach, that has been shown to improve the effectiveness of similarity search in multimedia databases, resorts to the usage of combinations of metrics where the desirable contribution (weight) of each metric is chosen at query time.
This paper presents a framework for adapting Metric Indexes to Multi-Metric indexes, that is to support similarity queries with dynamic combinations of metric functions. The adapted indexes are built with a single distance function and store partial distances to estimate the weighed distances.
An experimental evaluation shows that the adapted indexes may be as efficient as the original metric indexes.
