Quantum Optimal Transport for Tensor Field Processing

Abstract: This article introduces a new notion of optimal transport (OT) between tensor fields, which are measures whose values are positive semidefinite (PSD) matrices. This "quantum" formulation of OT (Q-OT) corresponds to a relaxed version of the classical Kantorovich transport problem, where the fidelity between the input PSD-valued measures is captured using the geometry of the Von-Neumann quantum entropy. We propose a quantum-entropic regularization of the resulting convex optimization problem, which can be solved efficiently using an iterative scaling algorithm. This method is a generalization of the celebrated Sinkhorn algorithm to the quantum setting of PSD matrices. We extend this formulation and the quantum Sinkhorn algorithm to compute barycenters within a collection of input tensor fields. We illustrate the usefulness of the proposed approach on applications to procedural noise generation, anisotropic meshing, diffusion tensor imaging and spectral texture synthesis.