A Convex Optimization Framework for Regularized Geodesic Distances

Abstract: We propose a general convex optimization problem for computing regularized geodesic distances. We show that under mild conditions on the regularizer the problem is well posed. We propose three different regularizers and provide analytical solutions in special cases, as well as corresponding efficient optimization algorithms. Additionally, we show how to generalize the approach to the all pairs case by formulating the problem on the product manifold, which leads to symmetric distances. Our regularized distances compare favorably to existing methods, in terms of robustness and ease of calibration.