  Learning representations on Grassmann manifolds is popular in quite a few
visual recognition tasks. In order to enable deep learning on Grassmann
manifolds, this paper proposes a deep network architecture by generalizing the
Euclidean network paradigm to Grassmann manifolds. In particular, we design
full rank mapping layers to transform input Grassmannian data to more desirable
ones, exploit re-orthonormalization layers to normalize the resulting matrices,
study projection pooling layers to reduce the model complexity in the
Grassmannian context, and devise projection mapping layers to respect
Grassmannian geometry and meanwhile achieve Euclidean forms for regular output
layers. To train the Grassmann networks, we exploit a stochastic gradient
descent setting on manifolds of the connection weights, and study a matrix
generalization of backpropagation to update the structured data. The
evaluations on three visual recognition tasks show that our Grassmann networks
have clear advantages over existing Grassmann learning methods, and achieve
results comparable with state-of-the-art approaches.
