Optimizing Domain-Specific Image Retrieval: A Benchmark of FAISS and Annoy with Fine-Tuned Features

Approximate Nearest Neighbor search is one of the keys to high-scale data retrieval performance in many applications. The work is a bridge between feature extraction and ANN indexing through fine-tuning a ResNet50 model with various ANN methods: FAISS and Annoy. We evaluate the systems with respect to indexing time, memory usage, query time, precision, recall, F1-score, and Recall@5 on a custom image dataset. FAISS's Product Quantization can achieve a precision of 98.40% with low memory usage at 0.24 MB index size, and Annoy is the fastest, with average query times of 0.00015 seconds, at a slight cost to accuracy. These results reveal trade-offs among speed, accuracy, and memory efficiency and offer actionable insights into the optimization of feature-based image retrieval systems. This study will serve as a blueprint for constructing actual retrieval pipelines and be built on fine-tuned deep learning networks and associated ANN methods.