The Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) is a well-known distance metric for data represented as probability distributions over a predefined feature space. Supporting EMD-based similarity search has attracted intensive research effort. Despite the plethora of literature, most existing solutions are optimized for Lp feature spaces (e.g., Euclidean space); while in a spectrum of applications, the relatio...

To classify time series by nearest neighbor, we need to specify or learn a distance. We consider several variations of the Mahalanobis distance and the related Large Margin Nearest Neighbor Classification (LMNN). We find that the conventional Mahalanobis distance is counterproductive. However, both LMNN and the class-based diagonal Mahalanobis distance are competitive.

Some researchers have proposed using non-Euclidean metrics for clustering data points. Generally, the metric should recognize that two points in the same cluster are close, even if their Euclidean distance is far. Multiple proposals have been suggested, including the Edge-Squared Metric (a specific example of a graph geodesic) and the Nearest Neighbor Metric. In this paper, we prove that the ed...

For classification of time series, the simple 1-nearest neighbor (1NN) classifier in combination with an elastic distance measure such as Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance is considered superior in terms of classification accuracy to many other more elaborate methods, including k-nearest neighbor (kNN) with neighborhood size k > 1. In this paper we revisit this apparently peculiar relationshi...

Assessment of pavement distresses is one of the important parts of pavement management systems to adopt the most effective road maintenance strategy. In the last decade, extensive studies have been done to develop automated systems for pavement distress processing based on machine vision techniques. One of the most important structural components of computer vision is the feature extraction met...

This paper presents an approach for improving the use of VP-tree in video indexing and searching. A vantage-point tree or VP-tree is one of the metric space-based indexing methods used in multimedia database searches and data retrieval. Instead of relying on the Euclidean distance as a measure of search space, the proposed approach focuses on the trigonometric inequality for compressing the sea...