Histogram similarity measure using variable bin size distance

Abstract

In order to improve the performance of bin-by-bin distances, this paper proposes variable bin size distance (VBSD) as the histogram similarity measure. It calculates the histogram distance in a fine-to-coarse way, and can be considered as a cross-bin extension for bin-by-bin distances. The VBSD can be used to measure the similarity of multi-dimensional histograms, and is insensitive to both the histogram translation and the variation of histogram bin size. Experimental results show that the variable bin size distance performs better than bin-by-bin distances in the image retrieval applications.