Unsupervised metric fusion by cross diffusion

Metric learning is n fundamental problem in computer vision. Different features and algorithms may tackle a problem from different angles, and thus often provide complementary information. In this paper; we propose a fusion algorithm which outputs enhanced metrics by combining multiple given metrics (similarity measures). Unlike traditional co-training style algorithms where multi-view features or multiple data subsets are used for classification or regression, we focus on fusing multiple given metrics through diffusion process in an unsupervised way. Our algorithm has its particular advantage when the input similarity' matrices are the outputs from diverse algorithms. We provide both theoretical and empirical explanations to our method. Significant improvements over the state-of-the-art results have been observed on various benchmark datasets. For example, we have achieved 100% accuracy (no longer the bull's eye measure) on the MPEG-7 shape dataset. Our method has a wide range of applications in machine learning and computer vision.