KCRC-LCD: Discriminative Kernel Collaborative Representation with Locality Constrained Dictionary for Visual Categorization

We consider the image classification problem via kernel collaborative representation classification with locality constrained dictionary (KCRC-LCD). Specifically, we propose a kernel collaborative representation classification (KCRC) approach in which kernel method is used to improve the discrimination ability of collaborative representation classification (CRC). We then measure the similarities between the query and atoms in the global dictionary in order to construct a locality constrained dictionary (LCD) for KCRC. In addition, we discuss several similarity measure approaches in LCD and further present a simple yet effective unified similarity measure whose superiority is validated in experiments. There are several appealing aspects associated with LCD. First, LCD can be nicely incorporated under the framework of KCRC. The LCD similarity measure can be kernelized under KCRC, which theoretically links CRC and LCD under the kernel method. Second, KCRC-LCD becomes more scalable to both the training set size and the feature dimension. Example shows that KCRC is able to perfectly classify data with certain distribution, while conventional CRC fails completely. Comprehensive experiments on many public datasets also show that KCRC-LCD is a robust discriminative classifier with both excellent performance and good scalability, being comparable or outperforming many other state-of-the-art approaches

C-HiLasso: A Collaborative Hierarchical Sparse Modeling Framework

Sparse modeling is a powerful framework for data analysis and processing. Traditionally, encoding in this framework is performed by solving an L1-regularized linear regression problem, commonly referred to as Lasso or Basis Pursuit. In this work we combine the sparsity-inducing property of the Lasso model at the individual feature level, with the block-sparsity property of the Group Lasso model, where sparse groups of features are jointly encoded, obtaining a sparsity pattern hierarchically structured. This results in the Hierarchical Lasso (HiLasso), which shows important practical modeling advantages. We then extend this approach to the collaborative case, where a set of simultaneously coded signals share the same sparsity pattern at the higher (group) level, but not necessarily at the lower (inside the group) level, obtaining the collaborative HiLasso model (C-HiLasso). Such signals then share the same active groups, or classes, but not necessarily the same active set. This model is very well suited for applications such as source identification and separation. An efficient optimization procedure, which guarantees convergence to the global optimum, is developed for these new models. The underlying presentation of the new framework and optimization approach is complemented with experimental examples and theoretical results regarding recovery guarantees for the proposed models

Sketch-based subspace clustering of hyperspectral images

Sparse subspace clustering (SSC) techniques provide the state-of-the-art in clustering of hyperspectral images (HSIs). However, their computational complexity hinders their applicability to large-scale HSIs. In this paper, we propose a large-scale SSC-based method, which can effectively process large HSIs while also achieving improved clustering accuracy compared to the current SSC methods. We build our approach based on an emerging concept of sketched subspace clustering, which was to our knowledge not explored at all in hyperspectral imaging yet. Moreover, there are only scarce results on any large-scale SSC approaches for HSI. We show that a direct application of sketched SSC does not provide a satisfactory performance on HSIs but it does provide an excellent basis for an effective and elegant method that we build by extending this approach with a spatial prior and deriving the corresponding solver. In particular, a random matrix constructed by the Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform is first used to sketch the self-representation dictionary as a compact dictionary, which significantly reduces the number of sparse coefficients to be solved, thereby reducing the overall complexity. In order to alleviate the effect of noise and within-class spectral variations of HSIs, we employ a total variation constraint on the coefficient matrix, which accounts for the spatial dependencies among the neighbouring pixels. We derive an efficient solver for the resulting optimization problem, and we theoretically prove its convergence property under mild conditions. The experimental results on real HSIs show a notable improvement in comparison with the traditional SSC-based methods and the state-of-the-art methods for clustering of large-scale images