In sparse recovery we are given a matrix @math (the dictionary) and a vector of the form @math where @math is sparse, and the goal is to recover @math . This is a central notion in signal processing, statistics and machine learning. But in applications such as sparse coding, edge detection, compression and super resolution, the dictionary @math is unknown and has to be learned from random examples of the form @math where @math is drawn from an appropriate distribution --- this is the dictionary learning problem. In most settings, @math is overcomplete: it has more columns than rows. This paper presents a polynomial-time algorithm for learning overcomplete dictionaries; the only previously known algorithm with provable guarantees is the recent work of Spielman, Wang and Wright who gave an algorithm for the full-rank case, which is rarely the case in applications. Our algorithm applies to incoherent dictionaries which have been a central object of study since they were introduced in seminal work of Donoho and Huo. In particular, a dictionary is @math -incoherent if each pair of columns has inner product at most @math . The algorithm makes natural stochastic assumptions about the unknown sparse vector @math , which can contain @math non-zero entries (for any @math ). This is close to the best @math allowable by the best sparse recovery algorithms even if one knows the dictionary @math exactly. Moreover, both the running time and sample complexity depend on @math , where @math is the target accuracy, and so our algorithms converge very quickly to the true dictionary. Our algorithm can also tolerate substantial amounts of noise provided it is incoherent with respect to the dictionary (e.g., Gaussian). In the noisy setting, our running time and sample complexity depend polynomially on @math , and this is necessary.
Dictionary learning is solved in practice by variants of alternating minimization . @cite_25 gave the first approach; subsequent popular approaches include the method of optimal directions (MOD) of @cite_4 , and K-SVD of @cite_5 . The general idea is to maintain a guess for @math and @math and at every step either update @math (using basis pursuit) or update @math by, say, solving a least squares problem. Provable guarantees for such algorithms have proved difficult because the initial guesses may be very far from the true dictionary, causing basis pursuit to behave erratically. Also, the algorithms could converge to a dictionary that is not incoherent, and thus unusable for sparse recovery. (In practice, these heuristics do often work.)
@cite_5 @cite_4 @cite_25
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A label consistent K-SVD (LC-KSVD) algorithm to learn a discriminative dictionary for sparse coding is presented. In addition to using class labels of training data, we also associate label information with each dictionary item (columns of the dictionary matrix) to enforce discriminability in sparse codes during the dictionary learning process. More specifically, we introduce a new label consistency constraint called "discriminative sparse-code error" and combine it with the reconstruction error and the classification error to form a unified objective function. The optimal solution is efficiently obtained using the K-SVD algorithm. Our algorithm learns a single overcomplete dictionary and an optimal linear classifier jointly. The incremental dictionary learning algorithm is presented for the situation of limited memory resources. It yields dictionaries so that feature points with the same class labels have similar sparse codes. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms many recently proposed sparse-coding techniques for face, action, scene, and object category recognition under the same learning conditions. The idea that many important classes of signals can be well-represented by linear combinations of a small set of atoms selected from a given dictionary has had dramatic impact on the theory and practice of signal processing. For practical problems in which an appropriate sparsifying dictionary is not known ahead of time, a very popular and successful heuristic is to search for a dictionary that minimizes an appropriate sparsity surrogate over a given set of sample data. While this idea is appealing, the behavior of these algorithms is largely a mystery; although there is a body of empirical evidence suggesting they do learn very eective representations, there is little theory to guarantee when they will behave correctly, or when the learned dictionary can be expected to generalize. In this paper, we take a step towards such a theory. We show that under mild hypotheses, the dictionary learning problem is locally well-posed: the desired solution is indeed a local minimum of the ‘ 1 norm. Namely, if A 2 R m n is an incoherent (and possibly overcomplete) dictionary, and the coecients X 2 R n p follow a random sparse model, then with high probability (A;X) is a local minimum of the ‘ 1 norm over the manifold of factorizations (A 0 ;X 0 ) satisfying A 0 X 0 = Y , provided the number of samples p = In a sparse-representation-based face recognition scheme, the desired dictionary should have good representational power (i.e., being able to span the subspace of all faces) while supporting optimal discrimination of the classes (i.e., different human subjects). We propose a method to learn an over-complete dictionary that attempts to simultaneously achieve the above two goals. The proposed method, discriminative K-SVD (D-KSVD), is based on extending the K-SVD algorithm by incorporating the classification error into the objective function, thus allowing the performance of a linear classifier and the representational power of the dictionary being considered at the same time by the same optimization procedure. The D-KSVD algorithm finds the dictionary and solves for the classifier using a procedure derived from the K-SVD algorithm, which has proven efficiency and performance. This is in contrast to most existing work that relies on iteratively solving sub-problems with the hope of achieving the global optimal through iterative approximation. We evaluate the proposed method using two commonly-used face databases, the Extended YaleB database and the AR database, with detailed comparison to 3 alternative approaches, including the leading state-of-the-art in the literature. The experiments show that the proposed method outperforms these competing methods in most of the cases. Further, using Fisher criterion and dictionary incoherence, we also show that the learned dictionary and the corresponding classifier are indeed better-posed to support sparse-representation-based recognition. By solving a linear inverse problem under a sparsity constraint, one can successfully recover the coefficients, if there exists such a sparse approximation for the proposed class of signals. In this framework the dictionary can be adapted to a given set of signals using dictionary learning methods. The learned dictionary often does not have useful structures for a fast implementation, i.e. fast matrix-vector multiplication. This prevents such a dictionary being used for the real applications or large scale problems. The structure can be induced on the dictionary throughout the learning progress. Examples of such structures are shift-invariance and being multi-scale. These dictionaries can be efficiently implemented using a filter bank. In this paper a well-known structure, called compressibility, is adapted to be used in the dictionary learning problem. As a result, the complexity of the implementation of a compressible dictionary can be reduced by wisely choosing a generative model. By some simulations, it has been shown that the learned dictionary provides sparser approximations, while it does not increase the computational complexity of the algorithms, with respect to the pre-designed fast structured dictionaries.