The problem of Poisson denoising appears in various imaging applications, such as low-light photography, medical imaging and microscopy. In cases of high SNR, several transformations exist so as to convert the Poisson noise into an additive i.i.d. Gaussian noise, for which many effective algorithms are available. However, in a low SNR regime, these transformations are significantly less accurate, and a strategy that relies directly on the true noise statistics is required. A recent work by Salmon et al. took this route, proposing a patch-based exponential image representation model based on GMM (Gaussian mixture model), leading to state-of-the-art results. In this paper, we propose to harness sparse-representation modeling to the image patches, adopting the same exponential idea. Our scheme uses a greedy pursuit with boot-strapping based stopping condition and dictionary learning within the denoising process. The reconstruction performance of the proposed scheme is competitive with leading methods in high SNR, and achieving state-of-the-art results in cases of low SNR.
Structured sparsity is an important modeling tool that expands the applicability of convex formulations for data analysis, however it also creates significant challenges for efficient algorithm design. In this paper we investigate the generalized conditional gradient (GCG) algorithm for solving structured sparse optimization problems---demonstrating that, with some enhancements, it can provide a more efficient alternative to current state of the art approaches. After providing a comprehensive overview of the convergence properties of GCG, we develop efficient methods for evaluating polar operators, a subroutine that is required in each GCG iteration. In particular, we show how the polar operator can be efficiently evaluated in two important scenarios: dictionary learning and structured sparse estimation. A further improvement is achieved by interleaving GCG with fixed-rank local subspace optimization. A series of experiments on matrix completion, multi-class classification, multi-view dictionary learning and overlapping group lasso shows that the proposed method can significantly reduce the training cost of current alternatives.
Visual data driven dictionaries have been successfully employed for various object recognition and classification tasks. However, the task becomes more challenging if the training and test data are from contrasting domains. In this paper, we propose a novel and generalized approach towards learning an adaptive and common dictionary for multiple domains. Precisely, we project the data from different domains onto a low dimensional space while preserving the intrinsic structure of data from each domain. We also minimize the domain-shift among the data from each pair of domains. Simultaneously, we learn a common adaptive dictionary. Our algorithm can also be modified to learn class-specific dictionaries which can be used for classification. We additionally propose a discriminative manifold regularization which imposes the intrinsic structure of class specific features onto the sparse coefficients. Experiments on image classification show that our approach fares better compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods.
This paper examines a general class of noisy matrix completion tasks where the goal is to estimate a matrix from observations obtained at a subset of its entries, each of which is subject to random noise or corruption. Our specific focus is on settings where the matrix to be estimated is well-approximated by a product of two (a priori unknown) matrices, one of which is sparse. Such structural models - referred to here as "sparse factor models" - have been widely used, for example, in subspace clustering applications, as well as in contemporary sparse modeling and dictionary learning tasks. Our main theoretical contributions are estimation error bounds for sparsity-regularized maximum likelihood estimators for problems of this form, which are applicable to a number of different observation noise or corruption models. Several specific implications are examined, including scenarios where observations are corrupted by additive Gaussian noise or additive heavier-tailed (Laplace) noise, Poisson-distributed observations, and highly-quantized (e.g., one-bit) observations. We also propose a simple algorithmic approach based on the alternating direction method of multipliers for these tasks, and provide experimental evidence to support our error analyses.
We give a new approach to the dictionary learning (also known as "sparse coding") problem of recovering an unknown $n\times m$ matrix $A$ (for $m \geq n$) from examples of the form \[ y = Ax + e, \] where $x$ is a random vector in $\mathbb R^m$ with at most $\tau m$ nonzero coordinates, and $e$ is a random noise vector in $\mathbb R^n$ with bounded magnitude. For the case $m=O(n)$, our algorithm recovers every column of $A$ within arbitrarily good constant accuracy in time $m^{O(\log m/\log(\tau^{-1}))}$, in particular achieving polynomial time if $\tau = m^{-\delta}$ for any $\delta>0$, and time $m^{O(\log m)}$ if $\tau$ is (a sufficiently small) constant. Prior algorithms with comparable assumptions on the distribution required the vector $x$ to be much sparser---at most $\sqrt{n}$ nonzero coordinates---and there were intrinsic barriers preventing these algorithms from applying for denser $x$. We achieve this by designing an algorithm for noisy tensor decomposition that can recover, under quite general conditions, an approximate rank-one decomposition of a tensor $T$, given access to a tensor $T'$ that is $\tau$-close to $T$ in the spectral norm (when considered as a matrix). To our knowledge, this is the first algorithm for tensor decomposition that works in the constant spectral-norm noise regime, where there is no guarantee that the local optima of $T$ and $T'$ have similar structures. Our algorithm is based on a novel approach to using and analyzing the Sum of Squares semidefinite programming hierarchy (Parrilo 2000, Lasserre 2001), and it can be viewed as an indication of the utility of this very general and powerful tool for unsupervised learning problems.
In this paper, we consider learning dictionary models over a network of agents, where each agent is only in charge of a portion of the dictionary elements. This formulation is relevant in Big Data scenarios where large dictionary models may be spread over different spatial locations and it is not feasible to aggregate all dictionaries in one location due to communication and privacy considerations. We first show that the dual function of the inference problem is an aggregation of individual cost functions associated with different agents, which can then be minimized efficiently by means of diffusion strategies. The collaborative inference step generates dual variables that are used by the agents to update their dictionaries without the need to share these dictionaries or even the coefficient models for the training data. This is a powerful property that leads to an effective distributed procedure for learning dictionaries over large networks (e.g., hundreds of agents in our experiments). Furthermore, the proposed learning strategy operates in an online manner and is able to respond to streaming data, where each data sample is presented to the network once.
Dictionary training for sparse representations involves dealing with large chunks of data and complex algorithms that determine time consuming implementations. SBO is an iterative dictionary learning algorithm based on constructing unions of orthonormal bases via singular value decomposition, that represents each data item through a single best fit orthobase. In this paper we present a GPGPU approach of implementing SBO in OpenCL. We provide a lock-free solution that ensures full-occupancy of the GPU by following the map-reduce model for the sparse-coding stage and by making use of the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) model for developing parallel dictionary updates. The resulting implementation achieves a favourable trade-off between algorithm complexity and data representation quality compared to PAK-SVD which is the standard overcomplete dictionary learning approach. We present and discuss numerical results showing a significant acceleration of the execution time for the dictionary learning process.
In this paper, the problem of de-noising of an image contaminated with Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) is studied. This subject is an open problem in signal processing for more than 50 years. Local methods suggested in recent years, have obtained better results than global methods. However by more intelligent training in such a way that first, important data is more effective for training, second, clustering in such way that training blocks lie in low-rank subspaces, we can design a dictionary applicable for image de-noising and obtain results near the state of the art local methods. In the present paper, we suggest a method based on global clustering of image constructing blocks. As the type of clustering plays an important role in clustering-based de-noising methods, we address two questions about the clustering. The first, which parts of the data should be considered for clustering? and the second, what data clustering method is suitable for de-noising.? Then clustering is exploited to learn an over complete dictionary. By obtaining sparse decomposition of the noisy image blocks in terms of the dictionary atoms, the de-noised version is achieved. In addition to our framework, 7 popular dictionary learning methods are simulated and compared. The results are compared based on two major factors: (1) de-noising performance and (2) execution time. Experimental results show that our dictionary learning framework outperforms its competitors in terms of both factors.
This work examines a semi-blind single-channel source separation problem. Our specific aim is to separate one source whose local structure is approximately known, from another a priori unspecified background source, given only a single linear combination of the two sources. We propose a separation technique based on local sparse approximations along the lines of recent efforts in sparse representations and dictionary learning. A key feature of our procedure is the online learning of dictionaries (using only the data itself) to sparsely model the background source, which facilitates its separation from the partially-known source. Our approach is applicable to source separation problems in various application domains; here, we demonstrate the performance of our proposed approach via simulation on a stylized audio source separation task.
We propose a batchwise monotone algorithm for dictionary learning. Unlike the state-of-the-art dictionary learning algorithms which impose sparsity constraints on a sample-by-sample basis, we instead treat the samples as a batch, and impose the sparsity constraint on the whole. The benefit of batchwise optimization is that the non-zeros can be better allocated across the samples, leading to a better approximation of the whole. To accomplish this, we propose procedures to switch non-zeros in both rows and columns in the support of the coefficient matrix to reduce the reconstruction error. We prove in the proposed support switching procedure the objective of the algorithm, i.e., the reconstruction error, decreases monotonically and converges. Furthermore, we introduce a block orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm that also operates on sample batches to provide a warm start. Experiments on both natural image patches and UCI data sets show that the proposed algorithm produces a better approximation with the same sparsity levels compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.
We introduce a novel method for using reflectance to identify materials. Reflectance offers a unique signature of the material but is challenging to measure and use for recognizing materials due to its high-dimensionality. In this work, one-shot reflectance is captured using a unique optical camera measuring {\it reflectance disks} where the pixel coordinates correspond to surface viewing angles. The reflectance has class-specific stucture and angular gradients computed in this reflectance space reveal the material class. These reflectance disks encode discriminative information for efficient and accurate material recognition. We introduce a framework called reflectance hashing that models the reflectance disks with dictionary learning and binary hashing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of reflectance hashing for material recognition with a number of real-world materials.
In histopathological image analysis, feature extraction for classification is a challenging task due to the diversity of histology features suitable for each problem as well as presence of rich geometrical structure. In this paper, we propose an automatic feature discovery framework for extracting discriminative class-specific features and present a low-complexity method for classification and disease grading in histopathology. Essentially, our Discriminative Feature-oriented Dictionary Learning (DFDL) method learns class-specific features which are suitable for representing samples from the same class while are poorly capable of representing samples from other classes. Experiments on three challenging real-world image databases: 1) histopathological images of intraductal breast lesions, 2) mammalian lung images provided by the Animal Diagnostics Lab (ADL) at Pennsylvania State University, and 3) brain tumor images from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, show the significance of DFDL model in a variety problems over state-of-the-art methods
Sparse representation models a signal as a linear combination of a small number of dictionary atoms. As a generative model, it requires the dictionary to be highly redundant in order to ensure both a stable high sparsity level and a low reconstruction error for the signal. However, in practice, this requirement is usually impaired by the lack of labelled training samples. Fortunately, previous research has shown that the requirement for a redundant dictionary can be less rigorous if simultaneous sparse approximation is employed, which can be carried out by enforcing various structured sparsity constraints on the sparse codes of the neighboring pixels. In addition, numerous works have shown that applying a variety of dictionary learning methods for the sparse representation model can also improve the classification performance. In this paper, we highlight the task-driven dictionary learning algorithm, which is a general framework for the supervised dictionary learning method. We propose to enforce structured sparsity priors on the task-driven dictionary learning method in order to improve the performance of the hyperspectral classification. Our approach is able to benefit from both the advantages of the simultaneous sparse representation and those of the supervised dictionary learning. We enforce two different structured sparsity priors, the joint and Laplacian sparsity, on the task-driven dictionary learning method and provide the details of the corresponding optimization algorithms. Experiments on numerous popular hyperspectral images demonstrate that the classification performance of our approach is superior to sparse representation classifier with structured priors or the task-driven dictionary learning method.
Condition-based predictive maintenance can significantly improve overall equipment effectiveness provided that appropriate monitoring methods are used. Online condition monitoring systems are customized to each type of machine and need to be reconfigured when conditions change, which is costly and requires expert knowledge. Basic feature extraction methods limited to signal distribution functions and spectra are commonly used, making it difficult to automatically analyze and compare machine conditions. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to automate the condition monitoring process by continuously learning a dictionary of optimized shift-invariant feature vectors using a well-known sparse approximation method. We study how the feature vectors learned from a vibration signal evolve over time when a fault develops within a ball bearing of a rotating machine. We quantify the adaptation rate of learned features and find that this quantity changes significantly in the transitions between normal and faulty states of operation of the ball bearing.
Dictionary learning algorithms have been successfully used in both reconstructive and discriminative tasks, where the input signal is represented by a linear combination of a few dictionary atoms. While these methods are usually developed under $\ell_1$ sparsity constrain (prior) in the input domain, recent studies have demonstrated the advantages of sparse representation using structured sparsity priors in the kernel domain. In this paper, we propose a supervised dictionary learning algorithm in the kernel domain for hyperspectral image classification. In the proposed formulation, the dictionary and classifier are obtained jointly for optimal classification performance. The supervised formulation is task-driven and provides learned features from the hyperspectral data that are well suited for the classification task. Moreover, the proposed algorithm uses a joint ($\ell_{12}$) sparsity prior to enforce collaboration among the neighboring pixels. The simulation results illustrate the efficiency of the proposed dictionary learning algorithm.
In this paper, we introduce a dictionary learning based approach applied to the problem of real-time reconstruction of MR image sequences that are highly undersampled in k-space. Unlike traditional dictionary learning, our method integrates both global and patch-wise (local) sparsity information and incorporates some priori information into the reconstruction process. Moreover, we use a Dependent Hierarchical Beta-process as the prior for the group-based dictionary learning, which adaptively infers the dictionary size and the sparsity of each patch; and also ensures that similar patches are manifested in terms of similar dictionary atoms. An efficient numerical algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is also presented. Through extensive experimental results we show that our proposed method achieves superior reconstruction quality, compared to the other state-of-the- art DL-based methods.
Dictionary learning and sparse representation (DLSR) is a recent and successful mathematical model for data representation that achieves state-of-the-art performance in various fields such as pattern recognition, machine learning, computer vision, and medical imaging. The original formulation for DLSR is based on the minimization of the reconstruction error between the original signal and its sparse representation in the space of the learned dictionary. Although this formulation is optimal for solving problems such as denoising, inpainting, and coding, it may not lead to optimal solution in classification tasks, where the ultimate goal is to make the learned dictionary and corresponding sparse representation as discriminative as possible. This motivated the emergence of a new category of techniques, which is appropriately called supervised dictionary learning and sparse representation (S-DLSR), leading to more optimal dictionary and sparse representation in classification tasks. Despite many research efforts for S-DLSR, the literature lacks a comprehensive view of these techniques, their connections, advantages and shortcomings. In this paper, we address this gap and provide a review of the recently proposed algorithms for S-DLSR. We first present a taxonomy of these algorithms into six categories based on the approach taken to include label information into the learning of the dictionary and/or sparse representation. For each category, we draw connections between the algorithms in this category and present a unified framework for them. We then provide guidelines for applied researchers on how to represent and learn the building blocks of an S-DLSR solution based on the problem at hand. This review provides a broad, yet deep, view of the state-of-the-art methods for S-DLSR and allows for the advancement of research and development in this emerging area of research.
A generative Bayesian model is developed for deep (multi-layer) convolutional dictionary learning. A novel probabilistic pooling operation is integrated into the deep model, yielding efficient bottom-up and top-down probabilistic learning. After learning the deep convolutional dictionary, testing is implemented via deconvolutional inference. To speed up this inference, a new statistical approach is proposed to project the top-layer dictionary elements to the data level. Following this, only one layer of deconvolution is required during testing. Experimental results demonstrate powerful capabilities of the model to learn multi-layer features from images. Excellent classification results are obtained on both the MNIST and Caltech 101 datasets.
Dictionary learning is a branch of signal processing and machine learning that aims at finding a frame (called dictionary) in which some training data admits a sparse representation. The sparser the representation, the better the dictionary. The resulting dictionary is in general a dense matrix, and its manipulation can be computationally costly both at the learning stage and later in the usage of this dictionary, for tasks such as sparse coding. Dictionary learning is thus limited to relatively small-scale problems. In this paper, inspired by usual fast transforms, we consider a general dictionary structure that allows cheaper manipulation, and propose an algorithm to learn such dictionaries --and their fast implementation-- over training data. The approach is demonstrated experimentally with the factorization of the Hadamard matrix and with synthetic dictionary learning experiments.
We develop a dictionary learning algorithm by minimizing the $\ell_1$ distortion metric on the data term, which is known to be robust for non-Gaussian noise contamination. The proposed algorithm exploits the idea of iterative minimization of weighted $\ell_2$ error. We refer to this algorithm as $\ell_1$-K-SVD, where the dictionary atoms and the corresponding sparse coefficients are simultaneously updated to minimize the $\ell_1$ objective, resulting in noise-robustness. We demonstrate through experiments that the $\ell_1$-K-SVD algorithm results in higher atom recovery rate compared with the K-SVD and the robust dictionary learning (RDL) algorithm proposed by Lu et al., both in Gaussian and non-Gaussian noise conditions. We also show that, for fixed values of sparsity, number of dictionary atoms, and data-dimension, the $\ell_1$-K-SVD algorithm outperforms the K-SVD and RDL algorithms when the training set available is small. We apply the proposed algorithm for denoising natural images corrupted by additive Gaussian and Laplacian noise. The images denoised using $\ell_1$-K-SVD are observed to have slightly higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) over K-SVD for Laplacian noise, but the improvement in structural similarity index (SSIM) is significant (approximately $0.1$) for lower values of input PSNR, indicating the efficacy of the $\ell_1$ metric.