Bridge detection and robust geodesics estimation via random walks

We propose an algorithm for detecting bridges and estimating geodesic distances from a set of noisy samples of an underlying manifold. Finding geodesics on a nearest neighbors graph is known to fail in the presence of bridges. Our method detects bridges using global statistics via a Markov random walk and denoises the nearest neighbors graph using “surrogate” weights. We show experimentally that our method outperforms methods based on local neighborhood statistics.