Intersecting Manifolds: Detection, Segmentation, and Labeling

Abstract

Solving multi-manifolds clustering problems that include delineating and resolving multiple intersections is a very challenging problem. In this paper we propose a novel procedure for clustering intersecting multi-manifolds and delineating junctions in high dimensional spaces. We propose to explicitly and directly resolve ambiguities near the intersections by using 2 properties: One is the position of the data points in the vicinity of the detected intersection; the other is the reliable estimation of the tangent spaces away from the intersections. We experiment with our method on a wide range of geometrically complex settings of convoluted intersecting manifolds, on which we demon- strate higher clustering performance than the state of the art. This includes tackling challenging geometric structures such as when the tangent spaces at the intersections points are not orthogonal.