Volume of metric balls in high-dimensional complex Grassmann manifolds

Volume of metric balls relates to rate-distortion theory and packing bounds on codes. In this paper, the volume of balls in complex Grassmann manifolds is evaluated for an arbitrary radius. The ball is defined as a set of hyperplanes of a fixed dimension with reference to a center of possibly different dimensions, and a generalized chordal distance for unequal dimensional subspaces is used. First, the volume is reduced to a 1-D integral representation. The overall problem boils down to evaluating a determinant of a matrix of the same size as the subspace dimensionality. Interpreting this determinant as a characteristic function of the Jacobi ensemble, an asymptotic analysis is carried out. The obtained asymptotic volume is moreover refined using moment-matching techniques to provide a tighter approximation in finite-size regimes. Finally, the pertinence of the derived results is shown by rate-distortion analysis of source coding on Grassmann manifolds.