Object Similarity by Humans and Machines

In this paper, we briefly address a research regarding how to objectively evaluate machine-based object similarity measures by human-based estimation. Based on a novel approach for similarity measure of 3-D objects we create a ground truth of 3-D objects and their similarities estimated by humans. The automatic similarity results achieved are evaluated against this ground truth in terms of precision and recall in an object retrieval scenario. To further illustrate the reciprocity properties between machine and human perception, we compare the similarities achieved by both on testing data and show how it can be used to address other problems and formulations.