journal article·2025-09-17Open access

Parallel Approaches for SNN-Based Nearest Neighbor Search in High-Dimensional Embedding Spaces: Application to Face Recognition

Lesia Mochurad, Roman Kapustiak

Applied Sciences· Volume 15· Issue 18

Abstract

The rapid growth of high-dimensional biometric data requires fast and accurate similarity search methods for real-time applications. This study proposes, for the first time, two efficient parallel implementations of the exact Sorting-based Nearest Neighbor (SNN) algorithm using OpenMP for CPUs and CUDA for GPUs. Comparative evaluation against conventional exact search methods—k-d tree and ball tree—on LFW embeddings, including FaceNet512 and VGG-Face, demonstrates an up to 58× speedup on GPUs while maintaining full accuracy. Analysis of the full recognition pipeline shows that parallelization reduces search times to about 27% of total processing, highlighting the method’s stability and efficiency for modern embeddings. These results confirm the applicability of the proposed approaches for real-time biometric identification, with potential extensions to streaming data, hybrid computing environments, and other high-dimensional representations.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Face and Expression Recognition · Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques · Image Retrieval and Classification Techniques

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Department of Artificial Intelligence, Lviv Polytechnic National University, 79013 Lviv, Ukraine

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