The k-nearest neighbor search query based on similarity is very important for content-based multimedia information retrieval(MIR). The conventional exact k-nearest neighbor search algorithm is not efficient for the MIR application because multimedia data should be represented as high dimensional feature vectors. Thus, an approximate k-nearest neighbor search algorithm is required for the MIR applications because the performance increase may outweigh the drawback of receiving approximate results. For this, we propose a new approximate k-nearest neighbor search algorithm for high dimensional data. In addition, the comparison of the conventional algorithm with our approximate k-nearest neighbor search algorithm is performed in terms of retrieval performance. Results show that our algorithm is more efficient than the conventional ones.