Fast Subspace Search via Grassmannian Based Hashing

The problem of efficiently deciding which of a database of models is most similar to a given input query arises throughout modern computer vision. Motivated by applications in recognition, image retrieval and optimization, there has been significant recent interest in the variant of this problem in which the database models are linear subspaces and the input is either a point or a subspace. Current approaches to this problem have poor scaling in high dimensions, and may not guarantee sub linear query complexity. We present a new approach to approximate nearest subspace search, based on a simple, new locality sensitive hash for subspaces. Our approach allows point-to-subspace query for a database of subspaces of arbitrary dimension d, in a time that depends sub linearly on the number of subspaces in the database. The query complexity of our algorithm is linear in the ambient dimension D, allowing it to be directly applied to high-dimensional imagery data. Numerical experiments on model problems in image repatching and automatic face recognition confirm the advantages of our algorithm in terms of both speed and accuracy.