  We introduce a kernel method for manifold alignment (KEMA) and domain
adaptation that can match an arbitrary number of data sources without needing
corresponding pairs, just few labeled examples in all domains. KEMA has
interesting properties: 1) it generalizes other manifold alignment methods, 2)
it can align manifolds of very different complexities, performing a sort of
manifold unfolding plus alignment, 3) it can define a domain-specific metric to
cope with multimodal specificities, 4) it can align data spaces of different
dimensionality, 5) it is robust to strong nonlinear feature deformations, and
6) it is closed-form invertible which allows transfer across-domains and data
synthesis. We also present a reduced-rank version for computational efficiency
and discuss the generalization performance of KEMA under Rademacher principles
of stability. KEMA exhibits very good performance over competing methods in
synthetic examples, visual object recognition and recognition of facial
expressions tasks.
