Seminal NIPS paper:
- Schölkopf, B. (2000). The kernel trick for distances. In Neural Information Processing Systems, pages 301-307.
There are many kernel design papers and books:
- Schölkopf, B. and Smola, A. J. (2002). Learning with kernels : support vector machines, regularization, optimization, and beyond. Adaptive computation and machine learning. MIT Press.
- Pekalska, E., Paclik, P., and Duin, R. P. W. (2002). A generalized kernel approach to dissimilarity-based classification. J. Mach. Learn. Res., 2:175-211.
- Pekalska, E. and Duin, R. P. W. (2005). The Dissimilarity Representation for Pattern Recognition. World Scientific Publishing Co., Inc., River Edge, NJ, USA.
- Haasdonk, B. and Bahlmann, C. (2004). Learning with distance substitution kernels. Pattern Recognition, volume 3175 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 220-227.