  Similarity search (nearest neighbor search) is a problem of pursuing the data
items whose distances to a query item are the smallest from a large database.
Various methods have been developed to address this problem, and recently a lot
of efforts have been devoted to approximate search. In this paper, we present a
survey on one of the main solutions, hashing, which has been widely studied
since the pioneering work locality sensitive hashing. We divide the hashing
algorithms two main categories: locality sensitive hashing, which designs hash
functions without exploring the data distribution and learning to hash, which
learns hash functions according the data distribution, and review them from
various aspects, including hash function design and distance measure and search
scheme in the hash coding space.
