Metric learning learns a metric function from training data to calculate the
similarity or distance between samples. From the perspective of feature
learning, metric learning essentially learns a new feature space by feature
transformation (e.g., Mahalanobis distance metric). However, traditional metric
learning algorithms are shallow, which just learn one metric space (feature
transformation). Can we further learn a better metric space from the learnt
metric space? In other words, can we learn metric progressively and nonlinearly
like deep learning by just using the existing metric learning algorithms? To
this end, we present a hierarchical metric learning scheme and implement an
online deep metric learning framework, namely ODML. Specifically, we take one
online metric learning algorithm as a metric layer, followed by a nonlinear
layer (i.e., ReLU), and then stack these layers modelled after the deep
learning. The proposed ODML enjoys some nice properties, indeed can learn
metric progressively and performs superiorly on some datasets. Various
experiments with different settings have been conducted to verify these
properties of the proposed ODML.Comment: 9 page