The boom of Internet and multimedia technology leads to the explosion of multimedia information, especially image, which has created an urgent need of quickly retrieving similar and interested images from huge image collections. The content-based high-dimensional indexing mechanism holds the key to achieving this goal by efficiently organizing the content of images and storing them in computer memory. In the past decades, many important developments in high-dimensional image indexing technologies have occurred to cope with the ‘curse of dimensionality’. The high-dimensional indexing mechanisms can mainly be divided into three categories: tree-based index, hashing-based index, and visual words based inverted index. In this paper we review the technologies with respect to these three categories of mechanisms, and make several recommendations for future research issues.

关键词： Tree-based index,  Hashing-based index,  Bag-of-features (BOF),  Descriptor encoding,  Inverted index