Entropy, Vol. 21, Pages 1121: Distribution Structure Learning Loss (DSLL) Based on Deep Metric Learning for Image Retrieval (Entropy)

The massive number of images demands highly efficient image retrieval tools. Deep distance metric learning (DDML) is proposed to learn image similarity metrics in an end-to-end manner based on the convolution neural network, which has achieved encouraging results. The loss function is crucial in DDML frameworks. However, we found limitations to this model. When learning the similarity of positive and negative examples, the current methods aim to pull positive pairs as close as possible and separate negative pairs into equal distances in the embedding space. Consequently, the data distribution might be omitted. In this work, we focus on the distribution structure learning loss (DSLL) algorithm that aims to preserve the geometric information of images. To achieve this, we firstly propose a metric distance learning for highly matching figures to preserve the similarity structure inside it. Second, we introduce an entropy weight-based structural distribution to set the weight of the representative negative samples. Third, we incorporate their weights into the process of learning to rank. So, the negative samples can preserve the consistency of their structural distribution. Generally, we display comprehensive experimental results drawing on three popular landmark building datasets and demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.