  Sparsity-based representations have recently led to notable results in
various visual recognition tasks. In a separate line of research, Riemannian
manifolds have been shown useful for dealing with features and models that do
not lie in Euclidean spaces. With the aim of building a bridge between the two
realms, we address the problem of sparse coding and dictionary learning over
the space of linear subspaces, which form Riemannian structures known as
Grassmann manifolds. To this end, we propose to embed Grassmann manifolds into
the space of symmetric matrices by an isometric mapping. This in turn enables
us to extend two sparse coding schemes to Grassmann manifolds. Furthermore, we
propose closed-form solutions for learning a Grassmann dictionary, atom by
atom. Lastly, to handle non-linearity in data, we extend the proposed Grassmann
sparse coding and dictionary learning algorithms through embedding into Hilbert
spaces.
  Experiments on several classification tasks (gender recognition, gesture
classification, scene analysis, face recognition, action recognition and
dynamic texture classification) show that the proposed approaches achieve
considerable improvements in discrimination accuracy, in comparison to
state-of-the-art methods such as kernelized Affine Hull Method and
graph-embedding Grassmann discriminant analysis.
