Parallel transport is a fundamental tool to perform statistics on Rie-mannian manifolds. Since closed formulae don't exist in general, practitioners often have to resort to numerical schemes. Ladder methods are a popular class of algorithms that rely on iterative constructions of geodesic parallelograms. And yet, the literature lacks a clear analysis of their convergence performance. In this work, we give Taylor approximations of the elementary constructions of Schild's ladder and the pole ladder with respect to the Riemann curvature of the underlying space. We then prove that these methods can be iterated to converge with quadratic speed, even when geodesics are approximated by numerical schemes. We also contribute a new link between Schild's ladder and the Fanning Scheme which explains why the latter naturally converges only linearly. The extra computational cost of ladder methods is thus easily compensated by a drastic reduction of the number of steps needed to achieve the requested accuracy. Illustrations on the 2-sphere, the space of symmetric positive definite matrices and the special Euclidean group show that the theoretical errors we have established are measured with a high accuracy in practice. The special Euclidean group with an anisotropic left-invariant metric is of particular interest as it is a tractable example of a non-symmetric space in general , which reduces to a Riemannian symmetric space in a particular case. As a secondary contribution, we compute the covariant derivative of the curvature in this space.
Kendall shape spaces are a widely used framework for the statistical analysis of shape data arising from many domains, often requiring the parallel transport as a tool to normalise time series data or transport gradient in optimisation procedures. We present an implementation of the pole ladder, an algorithm to compute parallel transport based on geodesic parallelograms and compare it to methods by integration of the parallel transport ordinary differential equation.
This paper presents a derivation of the parallel transport equation expressed in the Lie algebra of a Lie group endowed with a left-invariant metric.The use of this equation is exemplified on the group of rigid body motions SE(3), using basic numerical integration schemes, and compared to the pole ladder algorithm. This results in a stable and efficient implementation of parallel transport. The implementation leverages the python package geomstats and is available online.
This article presents a purely functional-analytic construction of the concept of stochastic parallel transport in Hermitian bundles over Riemannian manifolds. As a byproduct, we also obtain a form of the Feynman-Kac formula in vector bundles that is, to our best knowledge, the most general found so far.
This paper is motivated by recent developments of higher gauge theory. Different from its style of using higher category theory, we try to describe the concept of higher parallel transport within setting of classical principal bundle theory. From this perspective, we obtain a global geometric proof on a generalized 3-dimensional non-abelian Stokes' theorem related to parallel transport on surfaces. It can be naturally extended to four dimension when the underlying crossed module is replaced by crossed 2-module. This 4-dimensional Stokes' theorem yields a global formula for volume holonomy, and…
We provide a general theory for parallel transport on non-collapsed ${\sf RCD}$ spaces obtaining both existence and uniqueness results. Our theory covers the case of geodesics and, more generally, of curves obtained via the flow of sufficiently regular time dependent vector fields: the price that we pay for this generality is that we cannot study parallel transport along a single such curve, but only along almost all of these (in a sense related to the notions of Sobolev vector calculus and Regular Lagrangian Flow in the nonsmooth setting). The class of ${\sf ncRCD}$ spaces contains finite dim…
