Mining useful clusters from high dimensional data have received significant attention of the computer vision and pattern recognition community in the recent years. Linear and nonlinear dimensionality reduction has played an important role to overcome the curse of dimensionality. However, often such methods are accompanied with three different problems: high computational complexity (usually associated with the nuclear norm minimization), nonconvexity (for matrix factorization methods), and susceptibility to gross corruptions in the data. In this paper, we propose a principal component analysis (PCA) based solution that overcomes these three issues and approximates a low-rank recovery method for high dimensional datasets. We target the low-rank recovery by enforcing two types of graph smoothness assumptions, one on the data samples and the other on the features by designing a convex optimization problem. The resulting algorithm is fast, efficient, and scalable for huge datasets with O(n log(n)) computational complexity in the number of data samples. It is also robust to gross corruptions in the dataset as well as to the model parameters. Clustering experiments on 7 benchmark datasets with different types of corruptions and background separation experiments on 3 video datasets show that our proposed model outperforms 10 state-of-the-art dimensionality reduction models. Our theoretical analysis proves that the proposed model is able to recover approximate low-rank representations with a bounded error for clusterable data.
A large number of problems arising in computer vision can be reduced to the problem of minimizing the nuclear norm of a matrix, subject to additional structural and sparsity constraints on its elements. Examples of relevant applications include, among others, robust tracking in the presence of outliers, manifold embedding, event detection, in-painting and tracklet matching across occlusion. In principle, these problems can be reduced to a convex semi-definite optimization form and solved using interior point methods. However, the poor scaling properties of these methods limit the use of this approach to relatively small sized problems. The main result of this paper shows that structured nuclear norm minimization problems can be efficiently solved by using an iterative Augmented Lagrangian Type (ALM) method that only requires performing at each iteration a combination of matrix thresholding and matrix inversion steps. As we illustrate in the paper with several examples, the proposed algorithm results in a substantial reduction of computational time and memory requirements when compared against interior-point methods, opening up the possibility of solving realistic, large sized problems. Low-rank representation (LRR) intends to find the representation with lowest rank of a given data set, which can be formulated as a rank-minimisation problem. Since the rank operator is non-convex and discontinuous, most of the recent works use the nuclear norm as a convex relaxation. It is theoretically shown that, under some conditions, the Frobenius-norm-based optimisation problem has a unique solution that is also a solution of the original LRR optimisation problem. In other words, it is feasible to apply the Frobenius norm as a surrogate of the non-convex matrix rank function. This replacement will largely reduce the time costs for obtaining the lowest-rank solution. Experimental results show that the method (i.e. fast LRR (fLRR)) performs well in terms of accuracy and computation speed in image clustering and motion segmentation compared with nuclear-norm-based LRR algorithm. Rank minimization problem can be boiled down to either Nuclear Norm Minimization (NNM) or Weighted NNM (WNNM) problem. The problems related to NNM (or WNNM) can be solved iteratively by applying a closed-form proximal operator, called Singular Value Thresholding (SVT) (or Weighted SVT), but they suffer from high computational cost to compute a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) at each iteration. In this paper, we propose an accurate and fast approximation method for SVT, called fast randomized SVT (FRSVT), where we avoid direct computation of SVD. The key idea is to extract an approximate basis for the range of a matrix from its compressed matrix. Given the basis, we compute the partial singular values of the original matrix from a small factored matrix. While the basis approximation is the bottleneck, our method is already severalfold faster than thin SVD. By adopting a range propagation technique, we can further avoid one of the bottleneck at each iteration. Our theoretical analysis provides a stepping stone between the approximation bound of SVD and its effect to NNM via SVT. Along with the analysis, our empirical results on both quantitative and qualitative studies show our approximation rarely harms the convergence behavior of the host algorithms. We apply it and validate the efficiency of our method on various vision problems, e.g. subspace clustering, weather artifact removal, simultaneous multi-image alignment and rectification. Abstract Foreground detection is the first step in video surveillance system to detect moving objects. Recent research on subspace estimation by sparse representation and rank minimization represents a nice framework to separate moving objects from the background. Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) solved via Principal Component Pursuit decomposes a data matrix A in two components such that A = L + S , where L is a low-rank matrix and S is a sparse noise matrix. The background sequence is then modeled by a low-rank subspace that can gradually change over time, while the moving foreground objects constitute the correlated sparse outliers. To date, many efforts have been made to develop Principal Component Pursuit (PCP) methods with reduced computational cost that perform visually well in foreground detection. However, no current algorithm seems to emerge and to be able to simultaneously address all the key challenges that accompany real-world videos. This is due, in part, to the absence of a rigorous quantitative evaluation with synthetic and realistic large-scale dataset with accurate ground truth providing a balanced coverage of the range of challenges present in the real world. In this context, this work aims to initiate a rigorous and comprehensive review of RPCA-PCP based methods for testing and ranking existing algorithms for foreground detection. For this, we first review the recent developments in the field of RPCA solved via Principal Component Pursuit. Furthermore, we investigate how these methods are solved and if incremental algorithms and real-time implementations can be achieved for foreground detection. Finally, experimental results on the Background Models Challenge (BMC) dataset which contains different synthetic and real datasets show the comparative performance of these recent methods. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a widely used to learn a low-dimensional representation. In many applications, both vector data X and graph data W are available. Laplacian embedding is widely used for embedding graph data. We propose a graph-Laplacian PCA (gLPCA) to learn a low dimensional representation of X that incorporates graph structures encoded in W. This model has several advantages: (1) It is a data representation model. (2) It has a compact closed-form solution and can be efficiently computed. (3) It is capable to remove corruptions. Extensive experiments on 8 datasets show promising results on image reconstruction and significant improvement on clustering and classification. This paper proposes a new model of low-rank matrix factorization that incorporates manifold regularization to the matrix factorization. Superior to the graph-regularized nonnegative matrix factorization, this new regularization model has globally optimal and closed-form solutions. A direct algorithm (for data with small number of points) and an alternate iterative algorithm with inexact inner iteration (for large scale data) are proposed to solve the new model. A convergence analysis establishes the global convergence of the iterative algorithm. The efficiency and precision of the algorithm are demonstrated numerically through applications to six real-world datasets on clustering and classification. Performance comparison with existing algorithms shows the effectiveness of the proposed method for low-rank factorization in general. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is the most widely used tool for linear dimensionality reduction and clustering. Still it is highly sensitive to outliers and does not scale well with respect to the number of data samples. Robust PCA solves the first issue with a sparse penalty term. The second issue can be handled with the matrix factorization model, which is however non-convex. Besides, PCA based clustering can also be enhanced by using a graph of data similarity. In this article, we introduce a new model called 'Robust PCA on Graphs' which incorporates spectral graph regularization into the Robust PCA framework. Our proposed model benefits from 1) the robustness of principal components to occlusions and missing values, 2) enhanced low-rank recovery, 3) improved clustering property due to the graph smoothness assumption on the low-rank matrix, and 4) convexity of the resulting optimization problem. Extensive experiments on 8 benchmark, 3 video and 2 artificial datasets with corruptions clearly reveal that our model outperforms 10 other state-of-the-art models in its clustering and low-rank recovery tasks. The development of randomized algorithms for numerical linear algebra, e.g. for computing approximate QR and SVD factorizations, has recently become an intense area of research. This paper studies one of the most frequently discussed algorithms in the literature for dimensionality reduction--specifically for approximating an input matrix with a low-rank element. We introduce a novel and rather intuitive analysis of the algorithm in [6], which allows us to derive sharp estimates and give new insights about its performance. This analysis yields theoretical guarantees about the approximation error and at the same time, ultimate limits of performance (lower bounds) showing that our upper bounds are tight. Numerical experiments complement our study and show the tightness of our predictions compared with empirical observations. A lot of works have shown that frobenius-norm-based representation (FNR) is competitive to sparse representation and nuclear-norm-based representation (NNR) in numerous tasks such as subspace clustering. Despite the success of FNR in experimental studies, less theoretical analysis is provided to understand its working mechanism. In this brief, we fill this gap by building the theoretical connections between FNR and NNR. More specially, we prove that: 1) when the dictionary can provide enough representative capacity, FNR is exactly NNR even though the data set contains the Gaussian noise, Laplacian noise, or sample-specified corruption and 2) otherwise, FNR and NNR are two solutions on the column space of the dictionary. We analyze the parallel performance of randomized interpolative decomposition by decomposing low rank complex-valued Gaussian random matrices of about 100 GB. We chose a Cray XMT supercomputer as it provides an almost ideal PRAM model permitting quick investigation of parallel algorithms without obfuscation from hardware idiosyncrasies. We obtain that on non-square matrices performance scales almost linearly with runtime about 100 times faster on 128 processors. We also verify that numerically discovered error bounds still hold on matrices two orders of magnitude larger than those previously tested.