Social Embedding Image Distance Learning

Image distance (similarity) is a fundamental and important problem in image processing. However, traditional visual features based image distance metrics usually fail to capture human cognition. This paper presents a novel Social embedding Image Distance Learning (SIDL) approach to embed the similarity of collective social and behavioral information into visual space. The social similarity is estimated according to multiple social factors. Then a metric learning method is especially designed to learn the distance of visual features from the estimated social similarity. In this manner, we can evaluate the cognitive image distance based on the visual content of images. Comprehensive experiments are designed to investigate the effectiveness of SIDL, as well as the performance in the image recommendation and reranking tasks. The experimental results show that the proposed approach makes a marked improvement compared to the state-of-the-art image distance metrics. An interesting observation is given to show that the learned image distance can better reflect human cognition.