Dynamic off-the-grid untangling of curves by Riemannian metric

Abstract: We propose an improved strategy for point sources tracking in a temporal stack through an off-the-grid fashion, inspired by the Benamou-Brenier regularisation in the literature. We define a lifting of the problem in the higher-dimensional space of the roto-translation group. This allows us to overcome the theoretical limitation of the off-the-grid method towards tangled point source trajectories, thus enabling the reconstruction and untangling even from the numerical standpoint. We define accordingly a new regularisation based on the relaxed Reeds-Shepp metric, an approximation of the sub-Riemannian Reeds-Shepp metric, further allowing control on the local curvature of the recovered trajectories. Then, we derive some properties of the discretisation and prove a $\Gamma$-convergence result, fostering interest for practical applications of polygonal, B\'ezier, and piecewise geodesic discretisation. We finally test our proposed method on a localisation problem example, and give a fair comparison with the state-of-the-art off-the-grid method.