Such objects cause most known techniques to lose traction over large collections, due to a manifestation of the so-called curse of dimensionality, and there are still many unsolved problems.
Similarity search evolved independently in a number of different scientific and computing contexts, according to various needs.
This resulted in the formation of the SISAP foundation, whose main activity is a series of annual international conferences on the generic topic.
Once such situations are quantified and studied, many different metric indexing structures can be designed, variously suitable for different types of collections.
A popular approach for similarity search is locality sensitive hashing (LSH).