Sparse Coding on Symmetric Positive Definite Manifolds using Bregman Divergences

This paper introduces sparse coding and dictionary learning for Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices, which are often used in machine learning, computer vision and related areas. Unlike traditional sparse coding schemes that work in vector spaces, in this paper we discuss how SPD matrices can be described by sparse combination of dictionary atoms, where the atoms are also SPD matrices. We propose to seek sparse coding by embedding the space of SPD matrices into Hilbert spaces through two types of Bregman matrix divergences. This not only leads to an efficient way of performing sparse coding, but also an online and iterative scheme for dictionary learning. We apply the proposed methods to several computer vision tasks where images are represented by region covariance matrices. Our proposed algorithms outperform state-of-the-art methods on a wide range of classification tasks, including face recognition, action recognition, material classification and texture categorization

Sparse Modeling for Image and Vision Processing

In recent years, a large amount of multi-disciplinary research has been conducted on sparse models and their applications. In statistics and machine learning, the sparsity principle is used to perform model selection---that is, automatically selecting a simple model among a large collection of them. In signal processing, sparse coding consists of representing data with linear combinations of a few dictionary elements. Subsequently, the corresponding tools have been widely adopted by several scientific communities such as neuroscience, bioinformatics, or computer vision. The goal of this monograph is to offer a self-contained view of sparse modeling for visual recognition and image processing. More specifically, we focus on applications where the dictionary is learned and adapted to data, yielding a compact representation that has been successful in various contexts.Comment: 205 pages, to appear in Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Visio

Extrinsic Methods for Coding and Dictionary Learning on Grassmann Manifolds

Sparsity-based representations have recently led to notable results in various visual recognition tasks. In a separate line of research, Riemannian manifolds have been shown useful for dealing with features and models that do not lie in Euclidean spaces. With the aim of building a bridge between the two realms, we address the problem of sparse coding and dictionary learning over the space of linear subspaces, which form Riemannian structures known as Grassmann manifolds. To this end, we propose to embed Grassmann manifolds into the space of symmetric matrices by an isometric mapping. This in turn enables us to extend two sparse coding schemes to Grassmann manifolds. Furthermore, we propose closed-form solutions for learning a Grassmann dictionary, atom by atom. Lastly, to handle non-linearity in data, we extend the proposed Grassmann sparse coding and dictionary learning algorithms through embedding into Hilbert spaces. Experiments on several classification tasks (gender recognition, gesture classification, scene analysis, face recognition, action recognition and dynamic texture classification) show that the proposed approaches achieve considerable improvements in discrimination accuracy, in comparison to state-of-the-art methods such as kernelized Affine Hull Method and graph-embedding Grassmann discriminant analysis.Comment: Appearing in International Journal of Computer Visio