Estimation of Non-negative ODFs Using the Eigenvalue Distribution of Spherical Functions

Current methods in high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) estimate the probability density function of water diffusion as a continuous-valued orientation distribution function (ODF) on the sphere. However, such methods could produce an ODF with negative values, because they enforce non-negativity only at finitely many directions. In this paper, we propose to enforce non-negativity on the continuous domain by enforcing the positive semi-definiteness of Toeplitz-like matrices constructed from the spherical harmonic representation of the ODF. We study the distribution of the eigenvalues of these matrices and use it to derive an iterative semi-definite program that enforces non-negativity on the continuous domain. We illustrate the performance of our method and compare it to the state-of-the-art with experiments on synthetic and real data.