A system and method for comparing a query object and one or more of a set of database objects are provided. The method includes providing quantized representations of database objects. The database objects have each been transformed with a quantized embedding function which is the composition of a real-valued embedding function and a quantization function. The query object is transformed to a representation of the query object in a real-valued embedding space using the real-valued embedding function. Query-dependent estimated distance values are computed for the query object, based on the transformed query object and stored. A comparison (e.g., distance or similarity) measure between the query object and each of the quantized database object representations is computed based on the stored query-dependent estimated distance values. Data is output based on the comparison computation.