8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the computing a comparison measure between the query object and each of the quantized database objects is lower-bound-based.
8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the computing a comparison measure between the query object and each of the quantized database objects is lower-bound-based. 11. The method of claim 8 , wherein the lower-bound-based computing of the comparison measure between the query object and each of the quantized database objects comprises computing a lower bound on a distance between the query object x and each database object y according to the expression: 
 d LB ( x, y )=Σ k δ h k (x),h k (y) d ( g k ( x ), t k )  (32) where δ h k (x),h k (y) is the negation of the Kronecker delta, such that δ h k (x),h k (y) =0if h k (x)=h k (y) and 1 otherwise; h k (x) is a quantized representation of the query object; k is a dimension of a multi-dimensional embedding function; h k (y) is the quantized representation of the database object; d(g k (x),t k is a distance between the real-valued representation of the query object g k (x); and t k • is the quantization threshold of the quantization function.