I’ve been wanting to do something similar to this, but using locality sensitive hashing. The use case is an artificial life simulator I’m working on, where organisms with similar genomes (by some definition of similar) look visually similar so it’s easy to watch the proliferation of different cell lines around a medium. I’ve tried searching for prior art along the lines of visual indexing optimized for human brains, but haven’t really been able to turn anything up. Is there a term that I could search for?