DFlow and DField: New features for capturing object and image relationships

In this paper we propose two new types of features useful for problems in which one wants to describe object or image relationships rather than objects or images themselves. The features are based on the notion of distribution flow, as derived from the classic Transportation Problem. Two variants of such features, the Distribution Flow (DFlow) and Displacement Field (DField), are defined and studied. The proposed features show promising results in two different applications, Inter- and Intra-Class Relationship Characterization, and improve on simple concatenation of corresponding pairs of histograms.