ManifoldNorm: Extending normalizations on Riemannian Manifolds
This work addresses a bottleneck in deep learning for non-Euclidean data, such as in medical imaging, by providing a novel normalization method, though it is incremental as it adapts existing techniques to a new domain.
The authors tackled the instability in optimizing deep networks for manifold-valued data by proposing a general normalization technique, ManifoldNorm, which extends batch and group norms to non-Euclidean spaces and demonstrated performance gains in synthetic and real brain image datasets.
Many measurements in computer vision and machine learning manifest as non-Euclidean data samples. Several researchers recently extended a number of deep neural network architectures for manifold valued data samples. Researchers have proposed models for manifold valued spatial data which are common in medical image processing including processing of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) where images are fields of $3\times 3$ symmetric positive definite matrices or representation in terms of orientation distribution field (ODF) where the identification is in terms of field on hypersphere. There are other sequential models for manifold valued data that recently researchers have shown to be effective for group difference analysis in study for neuro-degenerative diseases. Although, several of these methods are effective to deal with manifold valued data, the bottleneck includes the instability in optimization for deeper networks. In order to deal with these instabilities, researchers have proposed residual connections for manifold valued data. One of the other remedies to deal with the instabilities including gradient explosion is to use normalization techniques including {\it batch norm} and {\it group norm} etc.. But, so far there is no normalization techniques applicable for manifold valued data. In this work, we propose a general normalization techniques for manifold valued data. We show that our proposed manifold normalization technique have special cases including popular batch norm and group norm techniques. On the experimental side, we focus on two types of manifold valued data including manifold of symmetric positive definite matrices and hypersphere. We show the performance gain in one synthetic experiment for moving MNIST dataset and one real brain image dataset where the representation is in terms of orientation distribution field (ODF).