Building an Image Hashing Search Engine with VP-Trees and OpenCV - PyImageSearch

In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a scalable image hashing search engine using OpenCV, Python, and VP-Trees. Back in 2017, I wrote a tutorial on image hashing with OpenCV and Python (which is required reading for this tutorial). That guide showed you how to find identical/duplicate images in a given dataset. However, there was a scalability problem with that original tutorial -- namely that it did not scale! To find near-duplicate images, our original image hashing method would require us to perform a linear search, comparing the query hash to each individual image hash in our dataset. In a practical, real-world application that's far too slow -- we need to find a way to reduce that search to sub-linear time complexity. But how can we reduce search time so dramatically?