1,770 research outputs found
Playing with Duality: An Overview of Recent Primal-Dual Approaches for Solving Large-Scale Optimization Problems
Optimization methods are at the core of many problems in signal/image
processing, computer vision, and machine learning. For a long time, it has been
recognized that looking at the dual of an optimization problem may drastically
simplify its solution. Deriving efficient strategies which jointly brings into
play the primal and the dual problems is however a more recent idea which has
generated many important new contributions in the last years. These novel
developments are grounded on recent advances in convex analysis, discrete
optimization, parallel processing, and non-smooth optimization with emphasis on
sparsity issues. In this paper, we aim at presenting the principles of
primal-dual approaches, while giving an overview of numerical methods which
have been proposed in different contexts. We show the benefits which can be
drawn from primal-dual algorithms both for solving large-scale convex
optimization problems and discrete ones, and we provide various application
examples to illustrate their usefulness
Structured Sparsity: Discrete and Convex approaches
Compressive sensing (CS) exploits sparsity to recover sparse or compressible
signals from dimensionality reducing, non-adaptive sensing mechanisms. Sparsity
is also used to enhance interpretability in machine learning and statistics
applications: While the ambient dimension is vast in modern data analysis
problems, the relevant information therein typically resides in a much lower
dimensional space. However, many solutions proposed nowadays do not leverage
the true underlying structure. Recent results in CS extend the simple sparsity
idea to more sophisticated {\em structured} sparsity models, which describe the
interdependency between the nonzero components of a signal, allowing to
increase the interpretability of the results and lead to better recovery
performance. In order to better understand the impact of structured sparsity,
in this chapter we analyze the connections between the discrete models and
their convex relaxations, highlighting their relative advantages. We start with
the general group sparse model and then elaborate on two important special
cases: the dispersive and the hierarchical models. For each, we present the
models in their discrete nature, discuss how to solve the ensuing discrete
problems and then describe convex relaxations. We also consider more general
structures as defined by set functions and present their convex proxies.
Further, we discuss efficient optimization solutions for structured sparsity
problems and illustrate structured sparsity in action via three applications.Comment: 30 pages, 18 figure
Generalized Forward-Backward Splitting
This paper introduces the generalized forward-backward splitting algorithm
for minimizing convex functions of the form , where
has a Lipschitz-continuous gradient and the 's are simple in the sense
that their Moreau proximity operators are easy to compute. While the
forward-backward algorithm cannot deal with more than non-smooth
function, our method generalizes it to the case of arbitrary . Our method
makes an explicit use of the regularity of in the forward step, and the
proximity operators of the 's are applied in parallel in the backward
step. This allows the generalized forward backward to efficiently address an
important class of convex problems. We prove its convergence in infinite
dimension, and its robustness to errors on the computation of the proximity
operators and of the gradient of . Examples on inverse problems in imaging
demonstrate the advantage of the proposed methods in comparison to other
splitting algorithms.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figure
A Non-Local Structure Tensor Based Approach for Multicomponent Image Recovery Problems
Non-Local Total Variation (NLTV) has emerged as a useful tool in variational
methods for image recovery problems. In this paper, we extend the NLTV-based
regularization to multicomponent images by taking advantage of the Structure
Tensor (ST) resulting from the gradient of a multicomponent image. The proposed
approach allows us to penalize the non-local variations, jointly for the
different components, through various matrix norms with .
To facilitate the choice of the hyper-parameters, we adopt a constrained convex
optimization approach in which we minimize the data fidelity term subject to a
constraint involving the ST-NLTV regularization. The resulting convex
optimization problem is solved with a novel epigraphical projection method.
This formulation can be efficiently implemented thanks to the flexibility
offered by recent primal-dual proximal algorithms. Experiments are carried out
for multispectral and hyperspectral images. The results demonstrate the
interest of introducing a non-local structure tensor regularization and show
that the proposed approach leads to significant improvements in terms of
convergence speed over current state-of-the-art methods
Blind Image Deblurring via Reweighted Graph Total Variation
Blind image deblurring, i.e., deblurring without knowledge of the blur
kernel, is a highly ill-posed problem. The problem can be solved in two parts:
i) estimate a blur kernel from the blurry image, and ii) given estimated blur
kernel, de-convolve blurry input to restore the target image. In this paper, by
interpreting an image patch as a signal on a weighted graph, we first argue
that a skeleton image---a proxy that retains the strong gradients of the target
but smooths out the details---can be used to accurately estimate the blur
kernel and has a unique bi-modal edge weight distribution. We then design a
reweighted graph total variation (RGTV) prior that can efficiently promote
bi-modal edge weight distribution given a blurry patch. However, minimizing a
blind image deblurring objective with RGTV results in a non-convex
non-differentiable optimization problem. We propose a fast algorithm that
solves for the skeleton image and the blur kernel alternately. Finally with the
computed blur kernel, recent non-blind image deblurring algorithms can be
applied to restore the target image. Experimental results show that our
algorithm can robustly estimate the blur kernel with large kernel size, and the
reconstructed sharp image is competitive against the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 5 pages, submitted to IEEE International Conference on Acoustics,
Speech and Signal Processing, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, April, 201
Low Complexity Regularization of Linear Inverse Problems
Inverse problems and regularization theory is a central theme in contemporary
signal processing, where the goal is to reconstruct an unknown signal from
partial indirect, and possibly noisy, measurements of it. A now standard method
for recovering the unknown signal is to solve a convex optimization problem
that enforces some prior knowledge about its structure. This has proved
efficient in many problems routinely encountered in imaging sciences,
statistics and machine learning. This chapter delivers a review of recent
advances in the field where the regularization prior promotes solutions
conforming to some notion of simplicity/low-complexity. These priors encompass
as popular examples sparsity and group sparsity (to capture the compressibility
of natural signals and images), total variation and analysis sparsity (to
promote piecewise regularity), and low-rank (as natural extension of sparsity
to matrix-valued data). Our aim is to provide a unified treatment of all these
regularizations under a single umbrella, namely the theory of partial
smoothness. This framework is very general and accommodates all low-complexity
regularizers just mentioned, as well as many others. Partial smoothness turns
out to be the canonical way to encode low-dimensional models that can be linear
spaces or more general smooth manifolds. This review is intended to serve as a
one stop shop toward the understanding of the theoretical properties of the
so-regularized solutions. It covers a large spectrum including: (i) recovery
guarantees and stability to noise, both in terms of -stability and
model (manifold) identification; (ii) sensitivity analysis to perturbations of
the parameters involved (in particular the observations), with applications to
unbiased risk estimation ; (iii) convergence properties of the forward-backward
proximal splitting scheme, that is particularly well suited to solve the
corresponding large-scale regularized optimization problem
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