  There is growing interest in representing image data and feature descriptors
using compact binary codes for fast near neighbor search. Although binary codes
are motivated by their use as direct indices (addresses) into a hash table,
codes longer than 32 bits are not being used as such, as it was thought to be
ineffective. We introduce a rigorous way to build multiple hash tables on
binary code substrings that enables exact k-nearest neighbor search in Hamming
space. The approach is storage efficient and straightforward to implement.
Theoretical analysis shows that the algorithm exhibits sub-linear run-time
behavior for uniformly distributed codes. Empirical results show dramatic
speedups over a linear scan baseline for datasets of up to one billion codes of
64, 128, or 256 bits.
