João R. Cardoso

João R. Cardoso, Amir Sadeghi

If ${A}$ has no eigenvalues on the closed negative real axis, and $B$ is arbitrary square complex, the matrix-matrix exponentiation is defined as $A^B:=e^{\log({A}){B}}$. This function arises, for instance, in Von Newmann's quantum-mechanical entropy, which in turn finds applications in other areas of science and engineering. Since in general $A$ and $B$ do not commute, this bivariate matrix function may not be a primary matrix function as commonly defined, which raises many challenging issues. In this paper, we revisit this function and derive new related results. Particular emphasis is given to its Fréchet derivative and conditioning. We present a general result on the Fréchet derivative of bivariate matrix functions with applications not only to the matrix-matrix exponentiation but also to other functions, such as the second order Fréchet derivatives and some iteration functions arising in matrix iterative methods. The numerical computation of the Fréchet derivative is discussed and an algorithm for computing the relative condition number of $A^B$ is proposed. Some numerical experiments are included.

João R. Cardoso, Pedro Miraldo, Helder Araujo

A given six dimensional vector represents a 3D straight line in Plucker coordinates if its coordinates satisfy the Klein quadric constraint. In many problems aiming to find the Plucker coordinates of lines, noise in the data and other type of errors contribute for obtaining 6D vectors that do not correspond to lines, because of that constraint. A common procedure to overcome this drawback is to find the Plucker coordinates of the lines that are closest to those vectors. This is known as the Plucker correction problem. In this article we propose a simple, closed-form, and global solution for this problem. When compared with the state-of-the-art method, one can conclude that our algorithm is easier and requires much less operations than previous techniques (it does not require Singular Value Decomposition techniques).