Learning Discriminative Fisher Kernels

Fisher kernels provide a commonly used vectorial representation of structured objects. The paper presents a technique that exploits label information to improve the object representation of Fisher kernels by employing ideas from metric learning. In particular, the new technique trains a generative model in such a way that the distance between the log-likelihood gradients induced by two objects with the same label is as small as possible, and the distance between the gradients induced by two objects with different labels is as large as possible. We illustrate the strong performance of classifiers trained on the resulting object representations on problems in handwriting recognition, speech recognition, facial expression analysis, and bio-informatics.