Learning effective color features for content based image retrieval in dermatology

We investigate the extraction of effective color features for a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) application in dermatology. Effectiveness is measured by the rate of correct retrieval of images from four color classes of skin lesions. We employ and compare two different methods to learn favorable feature representations for this special application: limited rank matrix learning vector quantization (LiRaM LVQ) and a Large Margin Nearest Neighbor (LMNN) approach. Both methods use labeled training data and provide a discriminant linear transformation of the original features, potentially to a lower dimensional space. The extracted color features are used to retrieve images from a database by a k-nearest neighbor search. We perform a comparison of retrieval rates achieved with extracted and original features for eight different standard color spaces. We achieved significant improvements in every examined color space. The increase of the mean correct retrieval rate lies between 10% and 27% in the range of k=1–25 retrieved images, and the correct retrieval rate lies between 84% and 64%. We present explicit combinations of RGB and CIE-Lab color features corresponding to healthy and lesion skin. LiRaM LVQ and the computationally more expensive LMNN give comparable results for large values of the method parameter κ of LMNN (κ≥25) while LiRaM LVQ outperforms LMNN for smaller values of κ. We conclude that feature extraction by LiRaM LVQ leads to considerable improvement in color-based retrieval of dermatologic images

A Survey on Metric Learning for Feature Vectors and Structured Data

The need for appropriate ways to measure the distance or similarity between data is ubiquitous in machine learning, pattern recognition and data mining, but handcrafting such good metrics for specific problems is generally difficult. This has led to the emergence of metric learning, which aims at automatically learning a metric from data and has attracted a lot of interest in machine learning and related fields for the past ten years. This survey paper proposes a systematic review of the metric learning literature, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. We pay particular attention to Mahalanobis distance metric learning, a well-studied and successful framework, but additionally present a wide range of methods that have recently emerged as powerful alternatives, including nonlinear metric learning, similarity learning and local metric learning. Recent trends and extensions, such as semi-supervised metric learning, metric learning for histogram data and the derivation of generalization guarantees, are also covered. Finally, this survey addresses metric learning for structured data, in particular edit distance learning, and attempts to give an overview of the remaining challenges in metric learning for the years to come.Comment: Technical report, 59 pages. Changes in v2: fixed typos and improved presentation. Changes in v3: fixed typos. Changes in v4: fixed typos and new method

A review of domain adaptation without target labels

Domain adaptation has become a prominent problem setting in machine learning and related fields. This review asks the question: how can a classifier learn from a source domain and generalize to a target domain? We present a categorization of approaches, divided into, what we refer to as, sample-based, feature-based and inference-based methods. Sample-based methods focus on weighting individual observations during training based on their importance to the target domain. Feature-based methods revolve around on mapping, projecting and representing features such that a source classifier performs well on the target domain and inference-based methods incorporate adaptation into the parameter estimation procedure, for instance through constraints on the optimization procedure. Additionally, we review a number of conditions that allow for formulating bounds on the cross-domain generalization error. Our categorization highlights recurring ideas and raises questions important to further research.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure