Minimum risk distance measure for object recognition

The optimal distance measure for a given discrimination task under the nearest neighbor framework has been shown to be the likelihood that a pair of measurements have different class labels [S. Mahamud et al., (2002)]. For implementation and efficiency considerations, the optimal distance measure was approximated by combining more elementary distance measures defined on simple feature spaces. We address two important issues that arise in practice for such an approach: (a) What form should the elementary distance measure in each feature space take? We motivate the need to use the optimal distance measure in simple feature spaces as the elementary distance measures; such distance measures have the desirable property that they are invariant to distance-respecting transformations, (b) How do we combine the elementary distance measures ? We present the precise statistical assumptions under which a linear logistic model holds exactly. We benchmark our model with three other methods on a challenging face discrimination task and show that our approach is competitive with the state of the art.