A Study on Clustering for Clustering Based Image De-Noising

In this paper, the problem of de-noising of an image contaminated with Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) is studied. This subject is an open problem in signal processing for more than 50 years. Local methods suggested in recent years, have obtained better results than global methods. However by more intelligent training in such a way that first, important data is more effective for training, second, clustering in such way that training blocks lie in low-rank subspaces, we can design a dictionary applicable for image de-noising and obtain results near the state of the art local methods. In the present paper, we suggest a method based on global clustering of image constructing blocks. As the type of clustering plays an important role in clustering-based de-noising methods, we address two questions about the clustering. The first, which parts of the data should be considered for clustering? and the second, what data clustering method is suitable for de-noising.? Then clustering is exploited to learn an over complete dictionary. By obtaining sparse decomposition of the noisy image blocks in terms of the dictionary atoms, the de-noised version is achieved. In addition to our framework, 7 popular dictionary learning methods are simulated and compared. The results are compared based on two major factors: (1) de-noising performance and (2) execution time. Experimental results show that our dictionary learning framework outperforms its competitors in terms of both factors.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, Journal of Information Systems and Telecommunications (JIST

Fast Robust PCA on Graphs

Mining useful clusters from high dimensional data has received significant attention of the computer vision and pattern recognition community in the recent years. Linear and non-linear 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), non-convexity (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(nlog(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

Clustering before training large datasets - Case study: K-SVD

Training and using overcomplete dictionaries has been the subject of many developments in the area of signal processing and sparse representations. The main idea is to train a dictionary that is able to achieve good sparse representations of the items contained in a given dataset. The most popular approach is the K-SVD algorithm and in this paper we study its application to large datasets. The main interest is to speedup the training procedure while keeping the representation errors close to some specific values. This goal is reached by using a clustering procedure, called here T-mindot, which reduces the size of the dataset but keeps the most representative data items and a measure of their importance. Experimental simulations compare the running times and representation errors of the training method with and without the clustering procedure and they clearly show how effective T-mindot is