Cross-Domain Matching with Squared-Loss Mutual Information

The goal of cross-domain matching (CDM) is to find correspondences between two sets of objects in different domains in an unsupervised way. CDM has various interesting applications, including photo album summarization where photos are automatically aligned into a designed frame expressed in the Cartesian coordinate system, and temporal alignment which aligns sequences such as videos that are potentially expressed using different features. In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic CDM framework based on squared-loss mutual information (SMI). The proposed approach can directly handle non-linearly related objects/sequences with different dimensions, with the ability that hyper-parameters can be objectively optimized by cross-validation. We apply the proposed method to several real-world problems including image matching, unpaired voice conversion, photo album summarization, cross-feature video and cross-domain video-to-mocap alignment, and Kinect-based action recognition, and experimentally demonstrate that the proposed method is a promising alternative to state-of-the-art CDM methods.