Discrete Binary Coding based Label Distribution Learning

Label Distribution Learning (LDL) is a general learning paradigm in machine learning, which includes both single-label learning (SLL) and multilabel learning (MLL) as its special cases. Recently, many LDL algorithms have been proposed to handle different application tasks such as facial age estimation, head pose estimation and visual sentiment distributions prediction. However, the training time complexity of most existing LDL algorithms is too high, which makes them unapplicable to large-scale LDL. In this paper, we propose a novel LDL method to address this issue, termed Discrete Binary Coding based Label Distribution Learning (DBC-LDL). Specifically, we design an efficiently discrete coding framework to learn binary codes for instances. Furthermore, both the pair-wise semantic similarities and the original label distributions are integrated into this framework to learn highly discriminative binary codes. In addition, a fast approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search strategy is utilized to predict label distributions for testing instances. Experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate its superior performance over several state-of-the-art LDL methods with the lower time cost.