  Modeling videos and image-sets as linear subspaces has proven beneficial for
many visual recognition tasks. However, it also incurs challenges arising from
the fact that linear subspaces do not obey Euclidean geometry, but lie on a
special type of Riemannian manifolds known as Grassmannian. To leverage the
techniques developed for Euclidean spaces (e.g, support vector machines) with
subspaces, several recent studies have proposed to embed the Grassmannian into
a Hilbert space by making use of a positive definite kernel. Unfortunately,
only two Grassmannian kernels are known, none of which -as we will show- is
universal, which limits their ability to approximate a target function
arbitrarily well. Here, we introduce several positive definite Grassmannian
kernels, including universal ones, and demonstrate their superiority over
previously-known kernels in various tasks, such as classification, clustering,
sparse coding and hashing.
