Using custom distance function with FLANN or Knn in OpenCv? - c++

Question

I'm working on code that computes dense SIFT features from a set of images, based on SIFT flow: http://people.csail.mit.edu/celiu/SIFTflow/
I'd like to try building a FLANN index on these images by comparing the "energy" between each image in SIFT flow representation.
I have the code to compute the energy from here: http://richardt.name/publications/video-deanaglyph/
Is there a way to create my own distance function for the indexing?
RELATED NOTE:
I was finally able to get an alternate (but not custom) distance function working with flann::Index. The trick is you need to use flann::GenericIndex like so:
flann::GenericIndex<cvflann::ChiSquareDistance<int>> flannIndex(descriptors, cvflann::KDTreeIndexParams());
But you need to give it CV_32S descriptors.
And if you use knnSearch with custom distance function, you have to provide a CV_32S results Mat and CV_32F distances Mat.
Here's my full code in case it's helpful (not a lot of documentation out there):
Mat samples;
loadDescriptors(samples); // loading descriptors from .yml file
samples *= 100000; // scaling up my descriptors to be int
samples.convertTo(samples, CV_32S); // convert float to int
// create flann index
flann::GenericIndex<cvflann::ChiSquareDistance<int>> flannIndex(samples, cvflann::KDTreeIndexParams());
// NOTE lack of distance type in constructor parameters
// (unlike flann::index)
// now try knnSearch
int k=10; // find 10 nearest neighbors
Mat results(1,10,CV_32S), dists(1,10,CV_32F);
// (1,10) Mats for the output, types CV_32S and CV_32F
Mat responseHistogram;
responseHistogram = samples.row(60);
// choose a random row from the descriptors Mat
// to find nearest neighbors
flannIndex.knnSearch(responseHist, results, dists, k, cvflann::SearchParams(200) );
cout << results << endl;
cout << dists << endl;
flannIndex.save(ofToDataPath("indexChi2.txt"));
Using Chi Squared actually seems to work better for me than L2 distance. My feature vectors are BoW histograms in this case.