Image kernels

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the mathematical properties of a few kernels specifically constructed for dealing with image data in binary classification and novelty detection problems. First, we show that histogram intersection is a Mercer’s kernel. Then, we show that a similarity measure based on the notion of Hausdorff distance and directly applicable to raw images, though not a Mercer’s kernel, is a kernel for novelty detection. Both kernels appear to be well suited for building effective vision-based learning systems.