Sparse coding with earth mover's distance for multi-instance histogram representation

作者：Zhang, Mohua^*; Peng, Jianhua; Liu, Xuejie

来源：Neural Computing & Applications, 2017, 28(12): 3697-3708.

DOI：10.1007/s00521-016-2269-9

• Multi-instance learning
• Histogram representation
• Sparse coding
• Earth mover's distance

Sparse coding (SC) has been studied very well as a powerful data representation method. It attempts to represent the feature vector of a data sample by reconstructing it as the sparse linear combination of some basic elements, and a norm distance function is usually used as the loss function for the reconstruction error. In this paper, we investigate using SC as the representation method within multi-instance learning framework, where a sample is given as a bag of instances and further represented as a histogram of the quantized instances. We argue that for the data type of histogram, using norm distance is not suitable, and propose to use the earth mover's distance (EMD) instead of norm distance as a measure of the reconstruction error. By minimizing the EMD between the histogram of a sample and the its reconstruction from some basic histograms, a novel sparse coding method is developed, which is refereed as SC-EMD. We evaluate its performances as a histogram representation method in tow multi-instance learning problems-abnormal image detection in wireless capsule endoscopy videos, and protein binding site retrieval. The encouraging results demonstrate the advantages of the new method over the traditional method using norm distance.

• 出版日期2017-12
• 单位河南财经政法大学