Steven B. Damelin

Yikun Bai, Huy Tran, Steven B. Damelin et al.

Point cloud registration plays a crucial role in various fields, including robotics, computer graphics, and medical imaging. This process involves determining spatial relationships between different sets of points, typically within a 3D space. In real-world scenarios, complexities arise from non-rigid movements and partial visibility, such as occlusions or sensor noise, making non-rigid registration a challenging problem. Classic non-rigid registration methods are often computationally demanding, suffer from unstable performance, and, importantly, have limited theoretical guarantees. The optimal transport problem and its unbalanced variations (e.g., the optimal partial transport problem) have emerged as powerful tools for point-cloud registration, establishing a strong benchmark in this field. These methods view point clouds as empirical measures and provide a mathematically rigorous way to quantify the `correspondence' between (the transformed) source and target points. In this paper, we approach the point-cloud registration problem through the lens of optimal transport theory and first propose a comprehensive set of non-rigid registration methods based on the optimal partial transportation problem. Subsequently, leveraging the emerging work on efficient solutions to the one-dimensional optimal partial transport problem, we extend our proposed algorithms via slicing to gain significant computational efficiency, resulting in fast and robust non-rigid registration algorithms. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods and compare them against baselines on various 3D and 2D non-rigid registration problems where the source and target point clouds are corrupted by random noise.

Kingsley Yeon, Steven B. Damelin

It is a classical result in rational approximation theory that certain non-smooth or singular functions, such as $|x|$ and $x^{1/p}$, can be efficiently approximated using rational functions with root-exponential convergence in terms of degrees of freedom \cite{Sta, GN}. In contrast, polynomial approximations admit only algebraic convergence by Jackson's theorem \cite{Lub2}. Recent work shows that composite polynomial architectures can recover exponential approximation rates even without smoothness \cite{KY}. In this work, we introduce and analyze a class of weighted deep polynomial approximants tailored for functions with asymmetric behavior-growing unbounded on one side and decaying on the other. By multiplying a learnable deep polynomial with a one-sided weight, we capture both local non-smoothness and global growth. We show numerically that this framework outperforms Taylor, Chebyshev, and standard deep polynomial approximants, even when all use the same number of parameters. To optimize these approximants in practice, we propose a stable graph-based parameterization strategy building on \cite{Jar}.

Leon A. Luxemburg, Steven B. Damelin

In this article we construct a maximal set of kernels for a multi-parameter linear scale-space that allow us to construct trees for classification and recognition of one-dimensional continuous signals similar the Gaussian linear scale-space approach. Fourier transform formulas are provided and used for quick and efficient computations. A number of useful properties of the maximal set of kernels are derived. We also strengthen and generalize some previous results on the classification of Gaussian kernels. Finally, a new topologically invariant method of constructing trees is introduced.

Steven B. Damelin, David L. Ragozin, Michael Werman

We study a realization of motion and similarity group equivalence classes of $n\geq 1$ labeled points in $\mathbb R^k,\, k\geq 1$ as a metric space with a computable metric. Our study is motivated by applications in computer vision.

Gurpreet S. Kalsi, Steven B. Damelin

For $s$ $>$ 0, we consider an algorithm that computes all $s$-well separated pairs in certain point sets in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$, $n$ $>1$. For an integer $K$ $>1$, we also consider an algorithm that is a permutation of Dijkstra's algorithm, that computes $K$-nearest neighbors using a certain power weighted shortest path metric in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$, $n$ $>$ $1$. We describe each algorithm and their respective dependencies on the input data. We introduce a way to combine both algorithms into a fused algorithm. Several open problems are given for future research.

Steven B. Damelin

This paper provides fascinating connections between several mathematical problems which lie on the intersection of several mathematics subjects, namely algebraic geometry, approximation theory, complex-harmonic analysis and high dimensional data science. Modern techniques in algebraic geometry, approximation theory, computational harmonic analysis and extensions develop the first of its kind, a unified framework which allows for a simultaneous study of labeled and unlabeled near alignment data problems in of $\mathbb R^D$ with the near isometry extension problem for discrete and non-discrete subsets of $\mathbb R^D$ with certain geometries. In addition, the paper surveys related work on clustering, dimension reduction, manifold learning, vision as well as minimal energy partitions, discrepancy and min-max optimization. Numerous open problems are given.

Steven B. Damelin, David L. Ragozin, Michael Werman

We study Min-Max affine approximants of a continuous convex or concave function $f:Δ\subset \mathbb R^k\xrightarrow{} \mathbb R$ where $Δ$ is a convex compact subset of $\mathbb R^k$. In the case when $Δ$ is a simplex we prove that there is a vertical translate of the supporting hyperplane in $\mathbb R^{k+1}$ of the graph of $f$ at the vertices which is the unique best affine approximant to $f$ on $Δ$. For $k=1$, this result provides an extension of the Chebyshev equioscillation theorem for linear approximants. Our result has interesting connections to the computer graphics problem of rapid rendering of projective transformations.