Difference metric for machine learning-based processing systems

Abstract

Systems and methods provide a learned difference metric that operates in a wide artifact space. An example method includes initializing a committee of deep neural networks with labeled distortion pairs, iteratively actively learning a difference metric using the committee and psychophysics tasks for informative distortion pairs, and using the difference metric as an objective function in a machine-learned digital file processing task. Iteratively actively learning the difference metric can include providing an unlabeled distortion pair as input to each of the deep neural networks in the committee, a distortion pair being a base image and a distorted image resulting from application of an artifact applied to the base image, obtaining a plurality of difference metric scores for the unlabeled distortion pair from the deep neural networks, and identifying the unlabeled distortion pair as an informative distortion pair when the difference metric scores satisfy a diversity metric.