Real Harmonic Analysis on the Special Orthogonal Group

Abstract: This paper presents theoretical analysis and software implementation for real harmonics analysis on the special orthogonal group. Noncommutative harmonic analysis for complex-valued functions on the special orthogonal group has been studied extensively. However, it is customary to treat real harmonic analysis as a special case of complex harmonic analysis, and there have been limited results developed specifically for real-valued functions. Here, we develop a set of explicit formulas for real-valued irreducible unitary representations on the special orthogonal group, and provide several operational properties, such as derivatives, sampling, and Clebsch-Gordon coefficients. Furthermore, we implement both of complex and real harmonics analysis on the special orthogonal group into an open source software package that utilizes parallel processing through the OpenMP library. The efficacy of the presented results are illustrated by benchmark studies and an application to spherical shape matching.