Earth Mover's Distance vs. Quadratic form Distance: An Analytical and Empirical Comparison

Abstract

It has been past more than a decade since the Earth Mover's Distance and the Quadratic Form Distance have been proposed as distance-based similarity measures for color-based image similarity. Ever since their utilization in various domains, they have developed into major general-purpose distance functions. In this paper, we subject both dissimilarity measures to a fundamental analytical and empirical analysis in order to reveal their strengths and weaknesses.