Patent ID: 8249361

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of generating a template map and a similarity metric used to determine a degree of visual similarity of two digital objects, comprising: storing a set of raw object templates, each raw object template representing image features derived from an object within a digital image of a corpus; iteratively performing an incremental learning process comprising: at each iteration, adding a map component to a template map that transforms a raw object template to a reduced object template, the reduced object template being stored in less memory than the raw object template; at each iteration, adding a metric component to a similarity metric that accepts as input two reduced object templates produced by the template map from raw object templates and produces as output a similarity score representing visual similarity of the objects represented by the two reduced object templates; wherein the metric component is added to the similarity metric based at least in part on values of the template map, and the map component is added to the template map based at least in part on values of the similarity metric; and storing the template map and the similarity metric.