Extended Grassmann Kernels for Subspace-Based Learning

Subspace-based learning problems involve data whose elements are linear subspaces of a vector space. To handle such data structures, Grassmann kernels have been proposed and used previously. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between Grassmann kernels and probabilistic similarity measures. Firstly, we show that the KL distance in the limit yields the Projection kernel on the Grassmann manifold, whereas the Bhattacharyya kernel becomes trivial in the limit and is suboptimal for subspace-based problems. Secondly, based on our analysis of the KL distance, we propose extensions of the Projection kernel which can be extended to the set of affine as well as scaled subspaces. We demonstrate the advantages of these extended kernels for classification and recognition tasks with Support Vector Machines and Kernel Discriminant Analysis using synthetic and real image databases.