Hierarchical manifold learning.

We present a novel method of hierarchical manifold learning which aims to automatically discover regional variations within images. This involves constructing manifolds in a hierarchy of image patches of increasing granularity, while ensuring consistency between hierarchy levels. We demonstrate its utility in two very different settings: (1) to learn the regional correlations in motion within a sequence of time-resolved images of the thoracic cavity; (2) to find discriminative regions of 3D brain images in the classification of neurodegenerative disease,