Convolutional neural networks (CNN) is the most mainstream solution in the field of image retrieval. Deep metric learning is introduced into the field of image retrieval, focusing on the construction of pair-based loss function. However, most pair-based loss functions of metric learning merely take common vector similarity (such as Euclidean distance) of the final image descriptors into consideration, while neglecting other distribution characters of these descriptors. In this work, we propose relative distribution entropy (RDE) to describe the internal distribution attributes of image descriptors. We combine relative distribution entropy with the Euclidean distance to obtain the relative distribution entropy weighted distance (RDE-distance). Moreover, the RDE-distance is fused with the contrastive loss and triplet loss to build the relative distributed entropy loss functions. The experimental results demonstrate that our method attains the state-of-the-art performance on most image retrieval benchmarks.
Keywords: Euclidean distance; deep metric learning; image retrieval; relative entropy.