distance would be close to zero, while the Bhattacharyya distance would not be. The Bhattacharyya coefficient is used in the construction of polar codes. The Bhattacharyya distance is used in feature extraction and selection, image processing, speaker recognition, and phone clustering. A "Bhattacharyya space" has been proposed as a feature selection technique that can be applied to texture segmentation. History Both the Bhattacharyya distance and the Bhattacharyya coefficient are named after Anil Kumar Bhattacharyya, a statistician who worked in the 1930s at the Indian Statistical Institute. He developed the method to measure the distance between two non-normal distributions and illustrated this with the classical multinomial populations as well as probability distributions that are absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure. The latter work appeared partly in 1943 in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society, while the former part, despite being submitted for publication in 1941, appeared almost five years later in Sankhya. See also Bhattacharyya angle Kullback–Leibler divergence Hellinger distance Mahalanobis distance Chernoff bound Rényi entropy F-divergence Fidelity of quantum states References For a short list of properties, see: http://www.mtm.ufsc.br/~taneja/book/node20.html External links Bhattacharyya's distance measure as a precursor of genetic distance measures, Journal of Biosciences, 2004 Statistical Intuition of Bhattacharyya's distance Statistical distance Statistical deviation and dispersion Anil Kumar Bhattacharya