Rigid Invariant Sliced Wasserstein via Independent Embeddings

Comparing probability measures modulo unknown rigid transformations is a central challenge in geometric data analysis. Classical optimal transport (OT) distances, including Wasserstein and sliced Wasserstein, are sensitive to rotations and reflections, whereas Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distances are invariant to isometries but computationally prohibitive for large datasets. We introduce Rigid-Invariant Sliced Wasserstein via Independent Embeddings (RISWIE), a scalable distance that combines the invariance of NP-hard approaches with the efficiency of projection-based OT. RISWIE utilizes data-adaptive bases and matches optimal signed permutations along axes according to distributional similarity to achieve rigid invariance with near-linear complexity in the sample size. We prove bounds relating RISWIE to GW in special cases and demonstrate dimension-independent statistical stability. Our experiments on cellular imaging and 3D human meshes demonstrate that RISWIE outperforms GW in clustering tasks and discriminative capability while significantly reducing runtime.