The tangent Earth mover's distance

Abstract

We present a new histogram distance, the Tangent Earth Mover's Distance (TEMD). The TEMD is a generalization of the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) that is invariant to some global transformations. Thus, like the EMD it is robust to local deformations. Additionally, it is robuster to global transformations such as global translations and rotations of the whole image. The TEMD is formulated as a linear program which allows efficient computation. Additionally, previous works about the efficient computation of the EMD that reduced the number of variables in the EMD linear program can be used to accelerate also the TEMD computation. We present results for image retrieval using the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and color image descriptors. We show that the new TEMD outperforms state of the art distances. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.