In recent years, the nearest neighbor search （NNS） problem has been widely used in various interesting applications. Locality-sensitive hashing （LSH）, a popular algorithm for the approximate nearest neighbor problem, is proved to be an efficient method to solve the NNS problem in the high-dimensional and large-scale databases. Based on the scheme of p-stable LSH, this paper introduces a novel improvement algorithm called randomness-based locality-sensitive hashing （RLSH） based on p-stable LSH. Our proposed algorithm modifies the query strategy that it randomly selects a certain hash table to project the query point instead of mapping the query point into all hash tables in the period of the nearest neighbor query and reconstructs the candidate points for finding the nearest neighbors. This improvement strategy ensures that RLSH spends less time searching for the nearest neighbors than the p-stable LSH algorithm to keep a high recall. Besides, this strategy is proved to promote the diversity of the candidate points even with fewer hash tables. Experiments are executed on the synthetic dataset and open dataset. The results show that our method can cost less time consumption and less space requirements than the p-stable LSH while balancing the same recall.
