Flow-based Generative Models for Learning Manifold to Manifold Mappings

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flow-based generative model for manifold-valued data, enabling modality transfer in brain imaging by synthesizing one type of measurement from another, with theoretical and experimental validation.

Contribution

It develops a two-stream GLOW model for manifold data and introduces invertible layers tailored for such data, expanding generative modeling to non-Euclidean measurements.

Findings

Successfully reconstructs brain images from DTI to ODF.

Achieves reliable modality transfer with promising accuracy.

Demonstrates applicability on large Human Connectome Project dataset.

Abstract

Many measurements or observations in computer vision and machine learning manifest as non-Euclidean data. While recent proposals (like spherical CNN) have extended a number of deep neural network architectures to manifold-valued data, and this has often provided strong improvements in performance, the literature on generative models for manifold data is quite sparse. Partly due to this gap, there are also no modality transfer/translation models for manifold-valued data whereas numerous such methods based on generative models are available for natural images. This paper addresses this gap, motivated by a need in brain imaging -- in doing so, we expand the operating range of certain generative models (as well as generative models for modality transfer) from natural images to images with manifold-valued measurements. Our main result is the design of a two-stream version of GLOW (flow-based invertible generative models) that can synthesize information of a field of one type of manifold-valued measurements given another. On the theoretical side, we introduce three kinds of invertible layers for manifold-valued data, which are not only analogous to their functionality in flow-based generative models (e.g., GLOW) but also preserve the key benefits (determinants of the Jacobian are easy to calculate). For experiments, on a large dataset from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), we show promising results where we can reliably and accurately reconstruct brain images of a field of orientation distribution functions (ODF) from diffusion tensor images (DTI), where the latter has a $5\times$ faster acquisition time but at the expense of worse angular resolution.