Many natural signals exhibit a sparse representation, whenever a suitable describing model is given. Here, a linear generative model is considered, where many sparsity-based signal processing techniques rely on such a simplified model. As this model is often unknown for many classes of the signals, we need to select such a model based on the domain knowledge or using some exemplar signals. This paper presents a new exemplar based approach for the linear model (called the dictionary) selection, for such sparse inverse problems. The problem of dictionary selection, which has also been called the dictionary learning in this setting, is first reformulated as a joint sparsity model. The joint sparsity model here differs from the standard joint sparsity model as it considers an overcompleteness in the representation of each signal, within the range of selected subspaces. The new dictionary selection paradigm is examined with some synthetic and realistic simulations.
Sparse modeling of signals has recently received a lot of attention. Often, a linear under-determined generative model for the signals of interest is proposed and a sparsity constraint imposed on the representation. When the generative model is not given, choosing an appropriate generative model is important, so that the given class of signals has approximate sparse representations. In this paper we introduce a new scheme for dictionary learning and impose an additional constraint to reduce the dictionary size. Small dictionaries are desired for coding applications and more likely to “work” with suboptimal algorithms such as Basis Pursuit. Another benefit of small dictionaries is their faster implementation, e.g. a reduced number of multiplication addition in each matrix vector multiplication, which is the bottleneck in sparse approximation algorithms.