Product quantization-based approaches are effective to encode
high-dimensional data points for approximate nearest neighbor search. The space
is decomposed into a Cartesian product of low-dimensional subspaces, each of
which generates a sub codebook. Data points are encoded as compact binary codes
using these sub codebooks, and the distance between two data points can be
approximated efficiently from their codes by the precomputed lookup tables.
Traditionally, to encode a subvector of a data point in a subspace, only one
sub codeword in the corresponding sub codebook is selected, which may impose
strict restrictions on the search accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel
approach, named Optimized Cartesian $K$-Means (OCKM), to better encode the data
points for more accurate approximate nearest neighbor search. In OCKM, multiple
sub codewords are used to encode the subvector of a data point in a subspace.
Each sub codeword stems from different sub codebooks in each subspace, which
are optimally generated with regards to the minimization of the distortion
errors. The high-dimensional data point is then encoded as the concatenation of
the indices of multiple sub codewords from all the subspaces. This can provide
more flexibility and lower distortion errors than traditional methods.
Experimental results on the standard real-life datasets demonstrate the
superiority over state-of-the-art approaches for approximate nearest neighbor
search.

本文提出了 Optimized Cartesian $K$-Means（OCKM）方法，用于对高维数据进行编码以实现更准确的最近邻搜索，通过多个子码本中的多个子码字进行编码以提供更大的灵活性和更低的失真误差