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.
Recently, mean-shift clustering with the heat kernel on Riemannian manifolds was introduced @cite_50 . However, due to the mathematical complexity of the kernel function, computing the exact kernel is not tractable and hence only an approximation of the true kernel was used. Parallel to our work, kernels on SPD matrices and on Grassmann manifolds were used in @cite_12 , albeit without explicit proof of their positive definiteness. In contrast, in this paper, we introduce a unified framework for analyzing the positive definiteness of the Gaussian kernel defined on any manifold and use this framework to identify provably positive definite kernels on the manifold of SPD matrices and on the Grassmann manifold.
@cite_12 @cite_50
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The original mean shift algorithm [1] on Euclidean spaces (MS) was extended in [2] to operate on general Riemannian manifolds. This extension is extrinsic (Ext-MS) since the mode seeking is performed on the tangent spaces [3], where the underlying curvature is not fully considered (tangent spaces are only valid in a small neighborhood). In [3] was proposed an intrinsic mean shift designed to operate on two particular Riemannian manifolds (IntGS-MS), i.e. Grassmann and Stiefel manifolds (using manifold-dedicated density kernels). It is then natural to ask whether mean shift could be intrinsically extended to work on a large class of manifolds. We propose a novel paradigm to intrinsically reformulate the mean shift on general Riemannian manifolds. This is accomplished by embedding the Riemannian manifold into a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) by using a general and mathematically well-founded Riemannian kernel function, i.e. heat kernel [5]. The key issue is that when the data is implicitly mapped to the Hilbert space, the curvature of the manifold is taken into account (i.e. exploits the underlying information of the data). The inherent optimization is then performed on the embedded space. Theoretic analysis and experimental results demonstrate the promise and effectiveness of this novel paradigm. Representing images and videos with Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices and considering the Riemannian geometry of the resulting space has proven beneficial for many recognition tasks. Unfortunately, computation on the Riemannian manifold of SPD matrices –especially of high-dimensional ones– comes at a high cost that limits the applicability of existing techniques. In this paper we introduce an approach that lets us handle high-dimensional SPD matrices by constructing a lower-dimensional, more discriminative SPD manifold. To this end, we model the mapping from the high-dimensional SPD manifold to the low-dimensional one with an orthonormal projection. In particular, we search for a projection that yields a low-dimensional manifold with maximum discriminative power encoded via an affinity-weighted similarity measure based on metrics on the manifold. Learning can then be expressed as an optimization problem on a Grassmann manifold. Our evaluation on several classification tasks shows that our approach leads to a significant accuracy gain over state-of-the-art methods. The manifold of Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices has been successfully used for data representation in image set classification. By endowing the SPD manifold with Log-Euclidean Metric, existing methods typically work on vector-forms of SPD matrix logarithms. This however not only inevitably distorts the geometrical structure of the space of SPD matrix logarithms but also brings low efficiency especially when the dimensionality of SPD matrix is high. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel metric learning approach to work directly on logarithms of SPD matrices. Specifically, our method aims to learn a tangent map that can directly transform the matrix logarithms from the original tangent space to a new tangent space of more discriminability. Under the tangent map framework, the novel metric learning can then be formulated as an optimization problem of seeking a Mahalanobis-like matrix, which can take the advantage of traditional metric learning techniques. Extensive evaluations on several image set classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed metric learning method. We tackle the problem of optimizing over all possible positive definite radial kernels on Riemannian manifolds for classification. Kernel methods on Riemannian manifolds have recently become increasingly popular in computer vision. However, the number of known positive definite kernels on manifolds remain very limited. Furthermore, most kernels typically depend on at least one parameter that needs to be tuned for the problem at hand. A poor choice of kernel, or of parameter value, may yield significant performance drop-off. Here, we show that positive definite radial kernels on the unit n-sphere, the Grassmann manifold and Kendall's shape manifold can be expressed in a simple form whose parameters can be automatically optimized within a support vector machine framework. We demonstrate the benefits of our kernel learning algorithm on object, face, action and shape recognition.