Optimization on the biorthogonal manifold

In this paper, we consider optimization problems w.r.t. to pairs of orthogonal matrices $XY = I$. Problems of this form arise in several applications such as finding shape correspondence in computer graphics. We show that the space of such matrices is a Riemannian manifold, which we call the biorthogonal manifold. To our knowledge, this manifold has not been studied before. We give expressions of tangent space projection, exponential map, and retraction operators of the biorthogonal manifold, and discuss their numerical implementation.