Learning image similarities via Probabilistic Feature Matching

In this paper, we propose a novel image similarity learning approach based on Probabilistic Feature Matching (PFM).We consider the matching process as the bipartite graph matching problem, and define the image similarity as the inner product of the feature similarities and their corresponding matching probabilities, which are learned by optimizing a quadratic formulation. Further, we prove that the image similarity and the sparsity of the learned matching probability distribution will decrease monotonically with the increase of parameter C in the quadratic formulation where C ≥ 0 is a pre-defined data-dependent constant to control the sparsity of the distribution of a feature matching probability. Essentially, our approach is the generalization of a family of similarity matching approaches. We test our approach on Graz datasets for object recognition, and achieve 89.4% on Graz-01 and 87.4% on Graz-02, respectively on average, which outperform the state-of-the-art.