Point clouds are sets of points in two or three dimensions. Most kernel
methods for learning on sets of points have not yet dealt with the specific
geometrical invariances and practical constraints associated with point clouds
in computer vision and graphics. In this paper, we present extensions of graph
kernels for point clouds, which allow to use kernel methods for such ob jects
as shapes, line drawings, or any three-dimensional point clouds. In order to
design rich and numerically efficient kernels with as few free parameters as
possible, we use kernels between covariance matrices and their factorizations
on graphical models. We derive polynomial time dynamic programming recursions
and present applications to recognition of handwritten digits and Chinese
characters from few training examples
