Nearest Neighbors matching

1、ANN: Approximate Nearest Neighbor  Searching

ANN is a library written in C++, which supports data structures and algorithms for both exact and approximate nearest neighbor searching in arbitrarily high dimensions.

In the nearest neighbor problem a set of data points in d-dimensional space is given. These points are preprocessed into a data structure, so that given any query point q, the nearest or generally k nearest points of P to q can be reported efficiently. The distance between two points can be defined in many ways. ANN assumes that distances are measured using any class of distance functions called Minkowski metrics. These include the well known Euclidean distance, Manhattan distance, and max distance.

Based on our own experience, ANN performs quite efficiently for point sets ranging in size from thousands to hundreds of thousands, and in dimensions as high as 20. (For applications in significantly higher dimensions, the results are rather spotty, but you might try it anyway.)

The library implements a number of different data structures, based on kd-trees and box-decomposition trees, and employs a couple of different search strategies.

The library also comes with test programs for measuring the quality of performance of ANN on any particular data sets, as well as programs for visualizing the structure of the geometric data structures.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~mount/ANN/

 

2、FLANN: Fast Library for Approximate  Nearest Neighbors

FLANN is a library for performing fast approximate nearest neighbor searches in high dimensional spaces. It contains a collection of algorithms we found to work best for nearest neighbor search and a system for automatically choosing the best algorithm and optimum parameters depending on the dataset.

FLANN is written in C++ and contains bindings for the following languages: C, MATLAB and Python.

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mariusm/index.php/FLANN/FLANN