Manifold-valued datasets are widely encountered in many computer vision tasks. A non-linear analog of the PCA algorithm, called the Principal Geodesic Analysis (PGA) algorithm suited for data lying on Riemannian manifolds was reported in literature a decade ago. Since the objective function in the PGA algorithm is highly non-linear and hard to solve efficiently in general, researchers have proposed a linear approximation. Though this linear approximation is easy to compute, it lacks accuracy especially when the data exhibits a large variance. Recently, an alternative called the exact PGA was proposed which tries to solve the optimization without any linearization. For general Riemannian manifolds, though it yields a better accuracy than the original (linearized) PGA, for data that exhibit large variance, the optimization is not computationally efficient. In this paper, we propose an efficient exact PGA algorithm for constant curvature Riemannian manifolds (CCM-EPGA). The CCM-EPGA algorithm differs significantly from existing PGA algorithms in two aspects, (i) the distance between a given manifold-valued data point and the principal submanifold is computed analytically and thus no optimization is required as in the existing methods. (ii) Unlike the existing PGA algorithms, the descent into codimension-1 submanifolds does not require any optimization but is accomplished through the use of the Rimeannian inverse Exponential map and the parallel transport operations. We present theoretical and experimental results for constant curvature Riemannian manifolds depicting favorable performance of the CCM-EPGA algorithm compared to existing PGA algorithms. We also present data reconstruction from the principal components which has not been reported in literature in this setting.

In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for computing a path of diffeomorphisms between a pair of input diffeomorphisms. Direct computation of a geodesic path on the space of diffeomorphisms Diff(Ω) is difficult, and it can be attributed mainly to the infinite dimensionality of Diff(Ω). Our proposed framework, to some degree, bypasses this difficulty using the quotient map of Diff(Ω) to the quotient space Diff(M)/Diff(M)μobtained by quotienting out the subgroup of volume-preserving diffeomorphisms Diff(M)μ. This quotient space was recently identified as the unit sphere in a Hilbert space in mathematics literature, a space with well-known geometric properties. Our framework leverages this recent result by computing the diffeomorphic path in two stages. First, we project the given diffeomorphism pair onto this sphere and then compute the geodesic path between these projected points. Second, we lift the geodesic on the sphere back to the space of diffeomerphisms, by solving a quadratic programming problem with bilinear constraints using the augmented Lagrangian technique with penalty terms. In this way, we can estimate the path of diffeomorphisms, first, staying in the space of diffeomorphisms, and second, preserving shapes/volumes in the deformed images along the path as much as possible. We have applied our framework to interpolate intermediate frames of frame-sub-sampled video sequences. In the reported experiments, our approach compares favorably with the popular Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping framework (LDDMM).

Complex diffusion was introduced in image processing literature as a means to achieve simultaneous denoising and enhancement of scalar valued images. In this paper, we present a novel geometric framework for achieving complex diffusion on color images expressed as image graphs. In this framework, we develop a new variational formulation for achieving complex diffusion. This formulation involves a modified harmonic map functional and is quite distinct from the Polyakov action described in earlier work by Sochen et al. Our formulation provides a framework for simultaneous (feature preserving) denoising and enhancement. We present results of comparison between the complex diffusion, and Beltrami flow all in the image graph framework.