In this paper, we propose an auto-encoder based generative neural network model whose encoder compresses the inputs into vectors in the tangent space of a special Lie group manifold: upper triangular positive definite affine transform matrices (UTDATs). UTDATs are representations of Gaussian distributions and can straightforwardly generate Gaussian distributed samples. Therefore, the encoder is trained together with a decoder (generator) which takes Gaussian distributed latent vectors as input. Compared with related generative models such as variational auto-encoder, the proposed model incorporates the information on geometric properties of Gaussian distributions. As a special case, we derive an exponential mapping layer for diagonal Gaussian UTDATs which eliminates matrix exponential operator compared with general exponential mapping in Lie group theory. Moreover, we derive an intrinsic loss for UTDAT Lie group which can be calculated as l-2 loss in the tangent space. Furthermore, inspired by the Lie group theory, we propose to use the Lie algebra vectors rather than the raw parameters (e.g. mean) of Gaussian distributions as compressed representations of original inputs. Experimental results verity the effectiveness of the proposed new generative model and the benefits gained from the Lie group structural information of UTDATs.
Geometric theories have been applied to analyze image feature space. In @cite_10 , covariance matrices are used as image feature representations for object detection. Because covariance matrices are symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices, which form a Riemannian manifold, a corresponding boosting algorithm is designed for SPD inputs. In @cite_2 , Gaussian distributions are used to model image features and the input space is analyzed using Lie group theory.
@cite_10 @cite_2
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We propose a novel discriminative learning approach to image set classification by modeling the image set with its natural second-order statistic, i.e. covariance matrix. Since nonsingular covariance matrices, a.k.a. symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices, lie on a Riemannian manifold, classical learning algorithms cannot be directly utilized to classify points on the manifold. By exploring an efficient metric for the SPD matrices, i.e., Log-Euclidean Distance (LED), we derive a kernel function that explicitly maps the covariance matrix from the Riemannian manifold to a Euclidean space. With this explicit mapping, any learning method devoted to vector space can be exploited in either its linear or kernel formulation. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS) are considered in this paper for their feasibility for our specific problem. We further investigate the conventional linear subspace based set modeling technique and cast it in a unified framework with our covariance matrix based modeling. The proposed method is evaluated on two tasks: face recognition and object categorization. Extensive experimental results show not only the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art ones in both accuracy and efficiency, but also its stability to two real challenges: noisy set data and varying set size. 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 describe a new region descriptor and apply it to two problems, object detection and texture classification. The covariance of d-features, e.g., the three-dimensional color vector, the norm of first and second derivatives of intensity with respect to x and y, etc., characterizes a region of interest. We describe a fast method for computation of covariances based on integral images. The idea presented here is more general than the image sums or histograms, which were already published before, and with a series of integral images the covariances are obtained by a few arithmetic operations. Covariance matrices do not lie on Euclidean space, therefore we use a distance metric involving generalized eigenvalues which also follows from the Lie group structure of positive definite matrices. Feature matching is a simple nearest neighbor search under the distance metric and performed extremely rapidly using the integral images. The performance of the covariance features is superior to other methods, as it is shown, and large rotations and illumination changes are also absorbed by the covariance matrix. Representing images and videos with Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices, and considering the Riemannian geometry of the resulting space, has been shown to yield high discriminative power in many visual 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 algorithms able to handle high-dimensional SPD matrices by constructing a lower-dimensional SPD manifold. To this end, we propose to model the mapping from the high-dimensional SPD manifold to the low-dimensional one with an orthonormal projection. This lets us formulate dimensionality reduction as the problem of finding a projection that yields a low-dimensional manifold either with maximum discriminative power in the supervised scenario, or with maximum variance of the data in the unsupervised one. We show that learning can be expressed as an optimization problem on a Grassmann manifold and discuss fast solutions for special cases. Our evaluation on several classification tasks evidences that our approach leads to a significant accuracy gain over state-of-the-art methods.