Vector and Matrix Optimal Mass Transport: Theory, Algorithm, and Applications

Abstract: In many applications such as color image processing, data has more than one piece of information associated with each spatial coordinate, and in such cases the classical optimal mass transport (OMT) must be generalized to handle vector-valued or matrix-valued densities. In this paper, we discuss the vector and matrix optimal mass transport and present three contributions. We first present a rigorous mathematical formulation for these setups and provide analytical results including existence of solutions and strong duality. Next, we present a simple, scalable, and parallelizable methods to solve the vector and matrix-OMT problems. Finally, we implement the proposed methods on a CUDA GPU and present experiments and applications.