Distance metric learning with eigenvalue fine tuning

Distance metric learning focuses on learning one global or multiple local distance functions to draw similar instances close to each other and push away dissimilar ones. Most existing work has to do matrix projection to learn distance functions. In this paper, we present a novel distance function learning model which is based on eigenvalue fine tuning. Our model not only is able to learn the global distance function but also can be easily adopted into local metric learning tasks. From the perspective of dimension reduction, the proposed model can measure how much information has been preserved after feature transformation. Moreover, we connect our model with principal components analysis to improve its performance by introducing the label information. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.