In a Django app, users upload various photos and get upvoted/downvoted (kind of like 9gag).
I want to put in place a basic check that prevents the user from re-submitting images already recently submitted on the website.
I don't need an airtight solution. How my question differs from other such questions on SO is that this isn't just a case of comparing two images, this is a case of comparing an uploaded image to , say, the 200 most recently uploaded images (my arbitrary cut-off). Performance takes the front seat.
Since I'm thumbnailing all images already (40px x 40px), I'm going to compare photo thumbnails instead of full-blown photos. This will be equivalent to comparing down-sampled objects, thus it'll be faster and more fuzzy (which is good).
My question is: is there a decent way to reduce image histograms to a unique number (of base 10 or 16, for instance)? If there is, I can store them in the DB, find the distance between such values, and impose an arbitrary cut-off. An illustrative example would be nice. This, in my head, sounds like the fastest way to handle my case.
Alternatively, if it can't be done due to various reasons, that's a legit answer too.