Local features have proven very useful for recognition.
Manifold learning has proven to be a very powerful tool in
data analysis. However, manifold learning application for
images are mainly based on holistic vectorized representations
of images. The challenging question that we address
in this paper is how can we learn image manifolds from a
punch of local features in a smooth way that captures the
feature similarity and spatial arrangement variability between
images. We introduce a novel framework for learning
a manifold representation from collections of local features
in images. We first show how we can learn a feature
embedding representation that preserves both the local appearance
similarity as well as the spatial structure of the
features. We also show how we can embed features from a
new image by introducing a solution for the out-of-sample
that is suitable for this context. By solving these two problems
and defining a proper distance measure in the feature
em...