Image compression using locally sensitive hashing

The problem of archiving photos is becoming increasingly important as image databases are growing more popular, and larger in size. One could take the example of any social networking website, where users share hundreds of photos, resulting in billions of total images to be stored. Ideally, one would like to use minimal storage to archive these images, by making use of the redundancy that they share, while not sacrificing quality. We suggest a compression algorithm that aims at compressing across images, rather than compressing images individually. This is a very novel approach that has never been adopted before. This report presents the design of a new image database compression tool. In addition to that, we implement a complete system on C++, and show the significant gains that we achieve in some cases, where we compress 90% of the initial data. One of the main tools we use is Locally Sensitive Hashing (LSH), a relatively new technique mainly used for similarity search in high-dimensions.