Signal Processing - November 2017 - 76

DEEP LEARNING FOR VISUAL UNDERSTANDING

Jiwen Lu, Junlin Hu, and Jie Zhou

Deep Metric Learning for Visual Understanding
An overview of recent advances

M

©ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/ZAPP2PHOTO

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2017.2732900
Date of publication: 13 November 2017

76

etric learning aims to learn a distance function to measure the similarity of samples, which plays an important
role in many visual understanding applications. Generally, the optimal similarity functions for different visual
understanding tasks are task specific because the distributions for data used in different tasks are usually different. It is
generally believed that learning a metric from training data
can obtain more encouraging performances than handcrafted
metrics [1]-[3], e.g., the Euclidean and cosine distances. A
variety of metric learning methods have been proposed in the
literature [2]-[5], and many of them have been successfully
employed in visual understanding tasks such as face recognition [6], [7], image classification [2], [3], visual search [8],
[9], visual tracking [10], [11], person reidentification [12],
cross-modal matching [13], image set classification [14], and
image-based geolocalization [15]-[17].
Metric learning techniques are usually classified into two
categories: unsupervised [4] and supervised [4]. Unsupervised
metric learning attempts to learn a low-dimensional subspace
to preserve the useful geometrical information of the samples.
Supervised metric learning, which is the mainstream metric
learning technique and the focus in this article, seeks an appropriate metric by formulating an optimization objective function to exploit supervised information of the training samples,
where the objective functions are designed for different specific tasks. However, most conventional metric learning methods
usually learn a linear mapping to project samples into a new
feature space, which suffer from the nonlinear relationship
of data points in metric learning. While the kernel trick can
be adopted to address this nonlinearity problem, this type of
method suffers from the scalability problem because the kernel
trick has two major issues: 1) choosing a kernel is typically difficult and quite empirical and 2) the expression power of kernel
functions is often not flexible enough to capture the nonlinearity in the data. Motivated by the fact that deep learning is an
effective solution to model the nonlinearity of samples, several deep metric learning (DML) methods [6]-[10], [12], [14],
[18]-[34] have been proposed in recent years. The key idea

IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE

|

November 2017

|

1053-5888/17©2017IEEE



http://www.ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/ZAPP2PHOTO

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signal Processing - November 2017

Signal Processing - November 2017 - Cover1
Signal Processing - November 2017 - Cover2
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 1
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 2
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 3
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 4
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 5
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 6
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 7
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 8
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 9
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 10
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 11
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 12
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 13
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 14
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 15
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 16
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 17
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 18
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 19
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 20
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 21
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 22
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 23
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 24
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 25
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 26
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 27
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 28
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 29
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 30
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 31
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 32
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 33
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 34
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 35
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 36
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 37
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 38
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 39
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 40
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 41
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 42
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 43
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 44
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 45
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 46
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 47
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 48
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 49
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 50
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 51
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 52
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 53
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 54
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 55
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 56
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 57
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 58
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 59
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 60
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 61
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 62
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 63
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 64
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 65
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 66
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 67
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 68
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 69
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 70
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 71
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 72
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 73
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 74
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 75
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 76
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 77
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 78
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 79
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 80
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 81
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 82
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 83
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 84
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 85
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 86
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 87
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 88
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 89
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 90
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 91
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 92
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 93
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 94
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 95
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 96
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 97
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 98
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 99
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 100
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 101
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 102
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 103
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 104
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 105
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 106
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 107
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 108
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 109
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 110
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 111
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 112
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 113
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 114
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 115
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 116
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 117
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 118
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 119
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 120
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 121
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 122
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 123
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 124
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 125
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 126
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 127
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 128
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 129
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 130
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 131
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 132
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 133
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 134
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 135
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 136
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 137
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 138
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 139
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 140
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 141
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 142
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 143
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 144
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 145
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 146
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 147
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 148
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 149
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 150
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 151
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 152
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 153
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 154
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 155
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 156
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 157
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 158
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 159
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 160
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 161
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 162
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 163
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 164
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 165
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 166
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 167
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 168
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 169
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 170
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 171
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 172
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 173
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 174
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 175
Signal Processing - November 2017 - 176
Signal Processing - November 2017 - Cover3
Signal Processing - November 2017 - Cover4
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_201809
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_201807
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_201805
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_201803
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_201801
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_1117
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0917
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0717
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0517
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0317
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0117
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_1116
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0916
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0716
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0516
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0316
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0116
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_1115
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0915
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0715
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0515
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0315
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0115
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_1114
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0914
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0714
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0514
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0314
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0114
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_1113
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0913
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0713
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0513
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0313
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0113
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_1112
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0912
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0712
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0512
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0312
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0112
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_1111
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0911
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0711
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0511
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0311
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0111
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_1110
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0910
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0710
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0510
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0310
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0110
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_1109
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0909
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0709
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0509
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0309
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0109
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_1108
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0908
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0708
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0508
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0308
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0108
https://www.nxtbookmedia.com