A Subspace Based Transfer Joint Matching with Laplacian Regularization for Visual Domain Adaptation

In a real-world application, the images taken by different cameras with different conditions often incur illumination variation, low-resolution, different poses, blur, etc., which leads to a large distribution difference or gap between training (source) and test (target) images. This distribution gap is challenging for many primitive machine learning classification and clustering algorithms such as k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) and k-means. In order to minimize this distribution gap, we propose a novel Subspace based Transfer Joint Matching with Laplacian Regularization (STJML) method for visual domain adaptation by jointly matching the features and re-weighting the instances across different domains. Specifically, the proposed STJML-based method includes four key components: (1) considering subspaces of both domains; (2) instance re-weighting; (3) it simultaneously reduces the domain shift in both marginal distribution and conditional distribution between the source domain and the target domain; (4) preserving the original similarity of data points by using Laplacian regularization. Experiments on three popular real-world domain adaptation problem datasets demonstrate a significant performance improvement of our proposed method over published state-of-the-art primitive and domain adaptation methods.