An image processing method and apparatus extracts unique identifiers directly from images and examines similarities between images using the extracted identifiers, by capturing a frame of an image; reducing the size of the captured frame; transforming the reduced frame to a frequency domain frame; creating an image feature vector by scanning frequency components of the frequency domain frame; computing inner product values by projecting the image feature vector onto random vectors; generating a fingerprint for identifying the captured frame by applying a Heaviside step function to the inner product values; and searching a database for information related to the generated fingerprint and outputting the search results.