Semi-Supervised Clustering via Learnt Codeword Distances

The similarity metric between videos is integral to several key tasks, including video retrieval, classification and recommendation. Since there is no standard criterion for the similarity measurement between videos except measuring manually, it is difficult to collect large training dataset for distance metric learning algorithms. Moreover, the existing distance metric learning (DML) methods for multimedia data suffer from two critical limitations: (1) they typically attempt to learn a distance function on the single label setting, in which each item is only labeled with single label; (2) they are often designed for learning distance metrics on low-level features, which ignore the semantic similarity of the multimedia data. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a novel framework of Intermediate Semantics based Distance Learning (ISDL) for video clips, which aims to integrate semantics of multiple modals optimally for distance metric learning. In particular, the proposed framework: (1) generates the training pairs automatically; (2) defines multi-modal concepts for similarity measure among videos; (3) learns the distance metric for video clips based on the intermediate semantics. We conduct an extensive set of experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms, and the results validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Multi-manifold metric learning for face recognition based on image sets

Distance metric learning (DML) aims to learn a distance metric to process the data distribution. However, most of the existing methods are k NN DML methods and employ the k NN model to classify the test instances. The drawback of k NN DML is that all training instances need to be accessed and stored to classify the test instances, and the classification performance is influenced by the setting of the nearest neighbor number k . To solve these problems, there are several DML methods that employ the SVM model to classify the test instances. However, all of them are nonconvex and the convex support vector DML method has not been explicitly proposed. In this article, we propose a convex model for support vector DML (CSV-DML), which is capable of replacing the k NN model of DML with the SVM model. To make CSV-DML can use the most kernel functions of the existing SVM methods, a nonlinear mapping is used to map the original instances into a feature space. Since the explicit form of nonlinear mapped instances is unknown, the original instances are further transformed into the kernel form, which can be calculated explicitly. CSV-DML is constructed to work directly on the kernel-transformed instances. Specifically, we learn a specific Mahalanobis distance metric from the kernel-transformed training instances and train a DML-based separating hyperplane based on it. An iterated approach is formulated to optimize CSV-DML, which is based on generalized block coordinate descent and can converge to the global optimum. In CSV-DML, since the dimension of kernel-transformed instances is only related to the number of original training instances, we develop a novel parameter reduction scheme for reducing the feature dimension. Extensive experiments show that the proposed CSV-DML method outperforms the previous methods.

Metric learning aims to learn a good distance metric that can capture the relationships among instances, and its importance has long been recognized in many fields. In the traditional settings of metric learning, an implicit assumption is that the associated labels of the instances are deterministic. However, in many real-world applications, the associated labels come naturally with probabilities instead of deterministic values. Thus, the existing metric learning methods cannot work well in these applications. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we study how to effectively learn the distance metric from datasets that contain probabilistic information, and then propose two novel metric learning mechanisms for two types of probabilistic labels, i.e., the instance-wise probabilistic label and the group-wise probabilistic label. Compared with the existing metric learning methods, our proposed mechanisms are capable of learning distance metrics directly from the probabilistic labels with high accuracy. We also theoretically analyze the two proposed mechanisms and provide theoretical bounds on the sample complexity for both of them. Additionally, extensive experiments based on real-world datasets are conducted to verify the desirable properties of the proposed mechanisms.

Lumbar disc degeneration (LDD) is a commonly age-associated condition related to low back pain, while its consequences are responsible for over 90% of spine surgical procedures. In clinical practice, grading of LDD by inspecting MRI is a necessary step to make a suitable treatment plan. This step purely relies on physicians manual inspection so that it brings the unbearable tediousness and inefficiency. An automated method for grading of LDD is highly desirable. However, the technical implementation faces a big challenge from class ambiguity, which is typical in medical image classification problems with a large number of classes. This typical challenge is derived from the complexity and diversity of medical images, which lead to a serious class overlapping and brings a great challenge in discriminating different classes. To solve this problem, we proposed an automated grading approach, which is based on supervised distance metric learning to classify the input discs into four class labels (0: normal, 1: slight, 2: marked, 3: severe). By learning distance metrics from labeled instances, an optimal distance metric is modeled and with two attractive advantages: (1) keeps images from the same classes close, and (2) keeps images from different classes far apart. The experiments, performed in 93 subjects, demonstrated the superiority of our method with accuracy 0.9226, sensitivity 0.9655, specificity 0.9083, F-score 0.8615. With our approach, physicians will be free from the tediousness and patients will be provided an effective treatment.

This study aims to develop content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system for the retrieval of T1-weighted contrast-enhanced MR (CE-MR) images of brain tumors. When a tumor region is fed to the CBIR system as a query, the system attempts to retrieve tumors of the same pathological category. The bag-of-visual-words (BoVW) model with partition learning is incorporated into the system to extract informative features for representing the image contents. Furthermore, a distance metric learning algorithm called the Rank Error-based Metric Learning (REML) is proposed to reduce the semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level semantic concepts. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated on a brain T1-weighted CE-MR dataset with three types of brain tumors (i.e., meningioma, glioma, and pituitary tumor). Using the BoVW model with partition learning, the mean average precision (mAP) of retrieval increases beyond 4.6% with the learned distance metrics compared with the spatial pyramid BoVW method. The distance metric learned by REML significantly outperforms three other existing distance metric learning methods in terms of mAP. The mAP of the CBIR system is as high as 91.8% using the proposed method, and the precision can reach 93.1% when the top 10 images are returned by the system. These preliminary results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and feasible for the retrieval of brain tumors in T1-weighted CE-MR Images.

Recent years have witnessed extensive studies on distance metric learning (DML) for improving similarity search in multimedia information retrieval tasks. Despite their successes, most existing DML methods suffer from two critical limitations: (i) they typically attempt to learn a linear distance function on the input feature space, in which the assumption of linearity limits their capacity of measuring the similarity on complex patterns in real-world applications; (ii) they are often designed for learning distance metrics on uni-modal data, which may not effectively handle the similarity measures for multimedia objects with multimodal representations. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel framework of online multimodal deep similarity learning (OMDSL), which aims to optimally integrate multiple deep neural networks pretrained with stacked denoising autoencoder. In particular, the proposed framework explores a unified two-stage online learning scheme that consists of (i) learning a flexible nonlinear transformation function for each individual modality, and (ii) learning to find the optimal combination of multiple diverse modalities simultaneously in a coherent process. We conduct an extensive set of experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms for multimodal image retrieval tasks, in which the encouraging results validate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

The security and integrity of computer systems and networks highly depend on malware detection. In the realm of malware detection, the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm is a well-liked and successful machine learning algorithm. However, the choice of an acceptable distance metric parameter has a significant impact on the KNN algorithm's performance. This study tries to improve malware detection by adjusting the KNN algorithm's distance metric parameter. The distance metric greatly influences the similarity or dissimilarity between instances in the feature space. The KNN algorithm for malware detection can be more accurate and effective by carefully choosing or modifying the distance metric. This paper analyzes multiple distance metrics, including Minkowski distance, Manhattan distance, and Euclidean distance. These metrics account for the traits of malware samples while capturing various aspects of similarity. The effectiveness of the KNN algorithm is evaluated using the MalMem-2022 malware dataset, and the results are broken down into these three-distance metrics. The experimental findings show that, among the three distance metric parameters, the Euclidean and Minkowski distance metric parameters considerably produced the best outcomes with binary classification. While with multiclass classification, the KNN algorithm has achieved the highest outcomes using Manhattan distance.

Learning distance metrics is a fundamental problem in machine learning. Previous distance-metric learning research assumes that the training and test data are drawn from the same distribution, which may be violated in practical applications. When the distributions differ, a situation referred to as covariate shift, the metric learned from training data may not work well on the test data. In this case the metric is said to be inconsistent. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a novel metric learning framework known as consistent distance metric learning (CDML), which solves the problem under covariate shift situations. We theoretically analyze the conditions when the metrics learned under covariate shift are consistent. Based on the analysis, a convex optimization problem is proposed to deal with the CDML problem. An importance sampling method is proposed for metric learning and two importance weighting strategies are proposed and compared in this work. Experiments are carried out on synthetic and real world datasets to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In real tasks, usually a good classification performance can only be obtained when a good distance metric is obtained; therefore, distance metric learning has attracted significant attention in the past few years. Typical studies of distance metric learning evaluate how to construct an appropriate distance metric that is able to separate training data points from different classes or satisfy a set of constraints (e.g., must-links and/or cannot-links). It is noteworthy that this task becomes challenging when there are only limited labeled training data points and no constraints are given explicitly. Moreover, most existing approaches aim to construct a global distance metric that is applicable to all data points. However, different data points may have different properties and may require different distance metrics. We notice that data points in real tasks are often connected by physical links (e.g., people are linked with each other in social networks; personal webpages are often connected to other webpages, including nonpersonal webpages), but the linkage information has not been exploited in distance metric learning. In this article, we develop a pairwised specific distance (PSD) approach that exploits the structures of physical linkages and in particular captures the key observations that nonmetric and clique linkages imply the appearance of different or unique semantics, respectively. It is noteworthy that, rather than generating a global distance, PSD generates different distances for different pairs of data points; this property is desired in applications involving complicated data semantics. We mainly present PSD for multi-class learning and further extend it to multi-label learning. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of PSD, especially in the scenarios in which there are very limited labeled training data points and no explicit constraints are given.

In the current years, advancements in medical imaging have prompted the rise of some massive databases, including the pictures from a different scope of modalities. Content based image retrieval (CBIR) is a kind of search that selects examples from an image set that have a similar content to an input query image. Each CBIR system consists of two substantial factors, feature extraction and similarity measure. Based on the type of these parts, many CBIR systems are proposed. In this paper we present not only how to design a CBIR system for MRI brain Tumor images, but also a comparison between the different implemented CBIR systems and ours. Furthermore, in this research, using a DML (Distance Metric Learning) instead of the rigid distance metric such as Euclidean distance as the Similarity measure has helped the researchers to obtain a better mAP (mean Average Precision) as the result. The experimental results of our CBIR system show that it has a better performance than other rivals in the field. The obtained mean average precision of our CBIR system is 92.41 that is significant in MRI brain tumor.

Despite being often considered less challenging than image-based person re-identification (re-id), video-based person re-id is still appealing as it mimics a more realistic scenario owing to the availability of pedestrian sequences from surveillance cameras. In order to exploit the temporal information provided, a number of feature extraction methods have been proposed. Although the features could be equally learned at a significantly higher computational cost, the scarce nature of labelled re-id datasets encourages the development of robust hand-crafted feature representations as an efficient alternative, especially when novel distance metrics or multi-shot ranking algorithms are to be validated. This paper presents a novel hand-crafted feature representation for video-based person re-id based on a 3-dimensional hierarchical Gaussian descriptor. Compared to similar approaches, the proposed descriptor (i) does not require any walking cycle extraction, hence avoiding the complexity of this task, (ii) can be easily fed into off-shelf learned distance metrics, (iii) and consistently achieves superior performance regardless of the matching method adopted. The performance of the proposed method was validated on PRID2011 and iLIDS-VID datasets outperforming similar methods on both benchmarks.

The problem of clustering with constraints has received considerable attention in the last decade. Indeed, several algorithms have been proposed, but only a few studies have (partially) compared their performances. In this work, three well-known algo

The accuracy of k-nearest neighbor (kNN) classification depends significantly on the metric used to compute distances between different examples. In this paper, we show how to learn a Mahalanobis distance metric for kNN classification from labeled examples. The Mahalanobis metric can equivalently be viewed as a global linear transformation of the input space that precedes kNN classification using Euclidean distances. In our approach, the metric is trained with the goal that the k-nearest neighbors always belong to the same class while examples from different classes are separated by a large margin. As in support vector machines (SVMs), the margin criterion leads to a convex optimization based on the hinge loss. Unlike learning in SVMs, however, our approach requires no modification or extension for problems in multiway (as opposed to binary) classification. In our framework, the Mahalanobis distance metric is obtained as the solution to a semidefinite program. On several data sets of varying size and difficulty, we find that metrics trained in this way lead to significant improvements in kNN classification. Sometimes these results can be further improved by clustering the training examples and learning an individual metric within each cluster. We show how to learn and combine these local metrics in a globally integrated manner.

We investigate the feasibility of constructing a data-driven distance metric for use in null-hypothesis testing in the context of arms-control treaty verification. The distance metric is used in testing the hypothesis that the available data are representative of a certain object or otherwise, as opposed to binary-classification tasks studied previously. The metric, being of strictly quadratic form, is essentially computed using projections of the data onto a set of optimal vectors. These projections can be accumulated in list mode. The relatively low number of projections hampers the possible reconstruction of the object and subsequently the access to sensitive information. The projection vectors that channelize the data are optimal in capturing the Mahalanobis squared distance of the data associated with a given object under varying nuisance parameters. The vectors are also chosen such that the resulting metric is insensitive to the difference between the trusted object and another object that is deemed to contain sensitive information. Data used in this study were generated using the GEANT4 toolkit to model gamma transport using a Monte Carlo method. For numerical illustration, the methodology is applied to synthetic data obtained using custom models for plutonium inspection objects. The resulting metric based on a relatively low number of channels shows moderate agreement with the Mahalanobis distance metric for the trusted object but enabling a capability to obscure sensitive information.