Fast earth mover's distance computation for catadioptric image sequences

Abstract

Earth mover's distance is one of the most effective metric for comparing histograms in various image retrieval applications. The main drawback is its computational complexity which hinders its usage in various comparison tasks. We propose fast earth mover's distance computation by providing better initialization to the transportation simplex algorithm. The new approach enables faster EMD computation in Visual Memory (VM) compared to the state of the art methods. The new proposed strategy computes earth mover distance without compromising its accuracy.