We study the problem of globally recovering a dictionary from a set of signals via ℓ1-minimization. We assume that the signals are generated as i.i.d. random linear combinations of the K atoms from a complete reference dictionary D∗∈RK×K, where the linear combination coefficients are from either a Bernoulli type model or exact sparse model. First, we obtain a necessary and sufficient norm condition for the reference dictionary D∗ to be a sharp local minimum of the expected ℓ1 objective function. Our result substantially extends that of Wu and Yu (2015) and allows the combination coefficient to be non-negative. Secondly, we obtain an explicit bound on the region within which the objective value of the reference dictionary is minimal. Thirdly, we show that the reference dictionary is the unique sharp local minimum, thus establishing the first known global property of ℓ1-minimization dictionary learning. Motivated by the theoretical results, we introduce a perturbation based test to determine whether a dictionary is a sharp local minimum of the objective function. In addition, we also propose a new dictionary learning algorithm based on Block Coordinate Descent, called DL-BCD, which is guaranteed to decrease the obective function monotonically. Simulation studies show that DL-BCD has competitive performance in terms of recovery rate compared to other state-of-the-art dictionary learning algorithms when the reference dictionary is generated from random Gaussian matrices.

No abstract uploaded!

No abstract uploaded!

This paper proposes using the neural networks to efficiently solve the second-order cone programs (SOCP). To establish the neural networks, the SOCP is first reformulated as a second-order cone complementarity problem (SOCCP) with the KarushKuhnTucker conditions of the SOCP. The SOCCP functions, which transform the SOCCP into a set of nonlinear equations, are then utilized to design the neural networks. We propose two kinds of neural networks with the different SOCCP functions. The first neural network uses the FischerBurmeister function to achieve an unconstrained minimization with a merit function. We show that the merit function is a Lyapunov function and this neural network is asymptotically stable. The second neural network utilizes the natural residual function with the cone projection function to achieve low computation complexity. It is shown to be Lyapunov stable and converges globally

In recent years, how to learn a dictionary from input images for sparse modelling has been one very active topic in image processing and recognition. Most existing dictionary learning methods consider an over-complete dictionary, e.g. the K-SVD method. Often they require solving some minimization problem that is very challenging in terms of computational feasibility and efficiency. However, if the correlations among dictionary atoms are not well constrained, the redundancy of the dictionary does not necessarily improve the performance of sparse coding. This paper proposed a fast orthogonal dictionary learning method for sparse image representation. With comparable performance on several image restoration tasks, the proposed method is much more computationally efficient than the over-complete dictionary based learning methods.