  Generative modeling over natural images is one of the most fundamental
machine learning problems. However, few modern generative models, including
Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Nets (WGANs), are studied on manifold-valued
images that are frequently encountered in real-world applications. To fill the
gap, this paper first formulates the problem of generating manifold-valued
images and exploits three typical instances: hue-saturation-value (HSV) color
image generation, chromaticity-brightness (CB) color image generation, and
diffusion-tensor (DT) image generation. For the proposed generative modeling
problem, we then introduce a theorem of optimal transport to derive a new
Wasserstein distance of data distributions on complete manifolds, enabling us
to achieve a tractable objective under the WGAN framework. In addition, we
recommend three benchmark datasets that are CIFAR-10 HSV/CB color images,
ImageNet HSV/CB color images, UCL DT image datasets. On the three datasets, we
experimentally demonstrate the proposed manifold-aware WGAN model can generate
more plausible manifold-valued images than its competitors.
