Improving Optimum-Path Forest Classification Using Unsupervised Manifold Learning

Appropriate metrics are paramount for machine learning and pattern recognition. In Content-based Image Retrieval-oriented applications, low-level features and pairwise-distance metrics are usually not capable of representing similarity among the objects as observed by humans. Therefore, metric learning from available data has become crucial in such applications, but just a few related approaches take into account the contextual information inherent from the samples for a better accuracy performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach which combines an unsupervised manifold learning algorithm with the Optimum-Path Forest (OPF) classifier to obtain more accurate recognition rates, as well as we show it can outperform standard OPF-based classifiers that are trained over the original manifold. Experiments conducted in some public datasets evidenced the validity of metric learning in the context of OPF classifiers.