  Distance metric learning (DML) aims to find an appropriate way to reveal the
underlying data relationship. It is critical in many machine learning, pattern
recognition and data mining algorithms, and usually require large amount of
label information (such as class labels or pair/triplet constraints) to achieve
satisfactory performance. However, the label information may be insufficient in
real-world applications due to the high-labeling cost, and DML may fail in this
case. Transfer metric learning (TML) is able to mitigate this issue for DML in
the domain of interest (target domain) by leveraging knowledge/information from
other related domains (source domains). Although achieved a certain level of
development, TML has limited success in various aspects such as selective
transfer, theoretical understanding, handling complex data, big data and
extreme cases. In this survey, we present a systematic review of the TML
literature. In particular, we group TML into different categories according to
different settings and metric transfer strategies, such as direct metric
approximation, subspace approximation, distance approximation, and distribution
approximation. A summarization and insightful discussion of the various TML
approaches and their applications will be presented. Finally, we indicate some
challenges and provide possible future directions.
