This paper conducts a rigorous analysis for provable estimation of multidimensional arrays, in particular third-order tensors, from a random subset of its corrupted entries. Our study rests heavily on a recently proposed tensor algebraic framework in which we can obtain tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD) that is similar to the SVD for matrices, and define a new notion of tensor rank referred to as the tubal rank. We prove that by simply solving a convex program, which minimizes a weighted combination of tubal nuclear norm, a convex surrogate for the tubal rank, and the @math -norm, one can recover an incoherent tensor exactly with overwhelming probability, provided that its tubal rank is not too large and that the corruptions are reasonably sparse. Interestingly, our result includes the recovery guarantees for the problems of tensor completion (TC) and tensor principal component analysis (TRPCA) under the same algebraic setup as special cases. An alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is presented to solve this optimization problem. Numerical experiments verify our theory and real-world applications demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.
Robust tensor recovery plays an instrumental role in robustifying tensor decompositions for multilinear data analysis against outliers, gross corruptions, and missing values and has a diverse array of applications. In this paper, we study the problem of robust low-rank tensor recovery in a convex optimization framework, drawing upon recent advances in robust principal component analysis and tensor completion. We propose tailored optimization algorithms with global convergence guarantees for solving both the constrained and the Lagrangian formulations of the problem. These algorithms are based on the highly efficient alternating direction augmented Lagrangian and accelerated proximal gradient methods. We also propose a nonconvex model that can often improve the recovery results from the convex models. We investigate the empirical recoverability properties of the convex and nonconvex formulations and compare the computational performance of the algorithms on simulated data. We demonstrate through a number o...  This article is about a curious phenomenon. Suppose we have a data matrix, which is the superposition of a low-rank component and a sparse component. Can we recover each component individuallyq We prove that under some suitable assumptions, it is possible to recover both the low-rank and the sparse components exactly by solving a very convenient convex program called Principal Component Pursuit; among all feasible decompositions, simply minimize a weighted combination of the nuclear norm and of the e1 norm. This suggests the possibility of a principled approach to robust principal component analysis since our methodology and results assert that one can recover the principal components of a data matrix even though a positive fraction of its entries are arbitrarily corrupted. This extends to the situation where a fraction of the entries are missing as well. We discuss an algorithm for solving this optimization problem, and present applications in the area of video surveillance, where our methodology allows for the detection of objects in a cluttered background, and in the area of face recognition, where it offers a principled way of removing shadows and specularities in images of faces. Confronted with the high-dimensional tensor-like visual data, we derive a method for the decomposition of an observed tensor into a low-dimensional structure plus unbounded but sparse irregular patterns. The optimal rank-(R1,R2, ...Rn) tensor decomposition model that we propose in this paper, could automatically explore the low-dimensional structure of the tensor data, seeking optimal dimension and basis for each mode and separating the irregular patterns. Consequently, our method accounts for the implicit multi-factor structure of tensor-like visual data in an explicit and concise manner. In addition, the optimal tensor decomposition is formulated as a convex optimization through relaxation technique. We then develop a block coordinate descent (BCD) based algorithm to efficiently solve the problem. In experiments, we show several applications of our method in computer vision and the results are promising. This paper studies the Tensor Robust Principal Component (TRPCA) problem which extends the known Robust PCA ( 2011) to the tensor case. Our model is based on a new tensor Singular Value Decomposition (t-SVD) (Kilmer and Martin 2011) and its induced tensor tubal rank and tensor nuclear norm. Consider that we have a 3-way tensor @math such that @math , where @math has low tubal rank and @math is sparse. Is that possible to recover both components? In this work, we prove that under certain suitable assumptions, we can recover both the low-rank and the sparse components exactly by simply solving a convex program whose objective is a weighted combination of the tensor nuclear norm and the @math -norm, i.e., @math , where @math . Interestingly, TRPCA involves RPCA as a special case when @math and thus it is a simple and elegant tensor extension of RPCA. Also numerical experiments verify our theory and the application for the image denoising demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.