On A Nonlinear Generalization of Sparse Coding and Dictionary Learning

Existing dictionary learning algorithms are based on the assumption that the data are vectors in an Euclidean vector space ℝ d , and the dictionary is learned from the training data using the vector space structure of ℝ d and its Euclidean L2-metric. However, in many applications, features and data often originated from a Riemannian manifold that does not support a global linear (vector space) structure. Furthermore, the extrinsic viewpoint of existing dictionary learning algorithms becomes inappropriate for modeling and incorporating the intrinsic geometry of the manifold that is potentially important and critical to the application. This paper proposes a novel framework for sparse coding and dictionary learning for data on a Riemannian manifold, and it shows that the existing sparse coding and dictionary learning methods can be considered as special (Euclidean) cases of the more general framework proposed here. We show that both the dictionary and sparse coding can be effectively computed for several important classes of Riemannian manifolds, and we validate the proposed method using two well-known classification problems in computer vision and medical imaging analysis.