The mean shift algorithm, which is a nonparametric density
estimator for detecting the modes of a distribution on a
Euclidean space, was recently extended to operate on analytic
manifolds. The extension is extrinsic in the sense that
the inherent optimization is performed on the tangent spaces
of these manifolds. This approach specifically requires the
use of the exponential map at each iteration. This paper
presents an alternative mean shift formulation, which performs
the iterative optimization “on” the manifold of interest
and intrinsically locates the modes via consecutive evaluations
of a mapping. In particular, these evaluations constitute
a modified gradient ascent scheme that avoids the computation
of the exponential maps for Stiefel and Grassmann
manifolds. The performance of our algorithm is evaluated
by conducting extensive comparative studies on synthetic
data as well as experiments on object categorization and
segmentation of multiple motions.