PARTIAL MATCHING RETRIEVAL METHOD, DEVICE THEREFOR AND RECORDING MEDIUM RECORDED WITH PARTIAL MATCHING RETRIEVAL PROGRAM

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a partial matching retrieval method capable of preventing the selection of a peculiar object coincidentally matching with an inquiry and surely selecting the most suitable object in the partial matching retrieval method for retrieving an object closest to inquiry information provided with the feature vector of a dimension lower than the one of the feature vectors of the respective objects inside a database. SOLUTION: After performing weighting based on similarity with an inquiry vector respectively to the feature vectors of the respective objects inside the database, the average vector of all the objects is calculated (step S2). An optimum vector whose end point is the intersection of an obtained weighted average vector and the inquiry vector is obtained (step S3) and the object provided with the feature vector most similar to the optimum vector is extracted (step S4). Thus, since retrieval considering the tendency of the entire objects is performed, the selection of the peculiar object coincidentally matching with the inquiry is prevented and the most suitable object is surely selected.