Radial Basis Approximation of Tensor Fields on Manifolds: From Operator Estimation to Manifold Learning

In this paper, we study the Radial Basis Function (RBF) approximation to differential operators on smooth tensor fields defined on closed Riemannian submanifolds of Euclidean space, identified by randomly sampled point cloud data. The formulation in this paper leverages a fundamental fact that the covariant derivative on a submanifold is the projection of the directional derivative in the ambient Euclidean space onto the tangent space of the submanifold. To differentiate a test function (or vector field) on the submanifold with …

approximation cloud cloud data covariant data differential fields function manifold operators paper space study tensor