In this paper, we develop an approach to exploiting kernel methods with manifold-valued data. In many computer vision problems, the data can be naturally represented as points on a Riemannian manifold. Due to the non-Euclidean geometry of Riemannian manifolds, usual Euclidean computer vision and machine learning algorithms yield inferior results on such data. In this paper, we define Gaussian radial basis function (RBF)-based positive definite kernels on manifolds that permit us to embed a given manifold with a corresponding metric in a high dimensional reproducing kernel Hilbert space. These kernels make it possible to utilize algorithms developed for linear spaces on nonlinear manifold-valued data. Since the Gaussian RBF defined with any given metric is not always positive definite, we present a unified framework for analyzing the positive definiteness of the Gaussian RBF on a generic metric space. We then use the proposed framework to identify positive definite kernels on two specific manifolds commonly encountered in computer vision: the Riemannian manifold of symmetric positive definite matrices and the Grassmann manifold, i.e., the Riemannian manifold of linear subspaces of a Euclidean space. We show that many popular algorithms designed for Euclidean spaces, such as support vector machines, discriminant analysis and principal component analysis can be generalized to Riemannian manifolds with the help of such positive definite Gaussian kernels.
It is important to note the difference between this work and manifold-learning methods such as @cite_51 . We work with data sampled from a manifold whose geometry is well known. In contrast, manifold-learning methods attempt to learn the structure of an underlying unknown manifold from data samples. Furthermore, those methods often assume that noise-free data samples lie on a manifold from which noise push them away. In our study, data points, regardless of their noise content, always lie on the mathematically well-defined manifold.
@cite_51
194200989 2147942061 2051666324 2134284153
In this paper, we study a family of semisupervised learning algorithms for “aligning” different data sets that are characterized by the same underlying manifold. The optimizations of these algorithms are based on graphs that provide a discretized approximation to the manifold. Partial alignments of the data sets—obtained from prior knowledge of their manifold structure or from pairwise correspondences of subsets of labeled examples— are completed by integrating supervised signals with unsupervised frameworks for manifold learning. As an illustration of this semisupervised setting, we show how to learn mappings between different data sets of images that are parameterized by the same underlying modes of variability (e.g., pose and viewing angle). The curse of dimensionality in these problems is overcome by exploiting the low dimensional structure of image manifolds. Existing dictionary learning algorithms are based on the assumption that the data are vectors in an Euclidean vector space Rd, and the dictionary is learned from the training data using the vector space structure of Rd and its Euclidean L2-metric. However, in many applications, features and data often originated from a Riemannian manifold that does not support a global linear (vector space) structure. Furthermore, the extrinsic viewpoint of existing dictionary learning algorithms becomes inappropriate for modeling and incorporating the intrinsic geometry of the manifold that is potentially important and critical to the application. This paper proposes a novel framework for sparse coding and dictionary learning for data on a Riemannian manifold, and it shows that the existing sparse coding and dictionary learning methods can be considered as special (Euclidean) cases of the more general framework proposed here. We show that both the dictionary and sparse coding can be effectively computed for several important classes of Riemannian manifolds, and we validate the proposed method using two well-known classification problems in computer vision and medical imaging analysis. Previous efforts in hashing intend to preserve data variance or pairwise affinity, but neither is adequate in capturing the manifold structures hidden in most visual data. In this paper, we tackle this problem by reconstructing the locally linear structures of manifolds in the binary Hamming space, which can be learned by locality-sensitive sparse coding. We cast the problem as a joint minimization of reconstruction error and quantization loss, and show that, despite its NP-hardness, a local optimum can be obtained efficiently via alternative optimization. Our method distinguishes itself from existing methods in its remarkable ability to extract the nearest neighbors of the query from the same manifold, instead of from the ambient space. On extensive experiments on various image benchmarks, our results improve previous state-of-the-art by 28-74 typically, and 627 on the Yale face data. Manifold regularization (, 2006) is a geometrically motivated framework for machine learning within which several semi-supervised algorithms have been constructed. Here we try to provide some theoretical understanding of this approach. Our main result is to expose the natural structure of a class of problems on which manifold regularization methods are helpful. We show that for such problems, no supervised learner can learn effectively. On the other hand, a manifold based learner (that knows the manifold or "learns" it from unlabeled examples) can learn with relatively few labeled examples. Our analysis follows a minimax style with an emphasis on finite sample results (in terms of n: the number of labeled examples). These results allow us to properly interpret manifold regularization and related spectral and geometric algorithms in terms of their potential use in semi-supervised learning.