Tensor N-tubal rank and its convex relaxation for low-rank tensor recovery

As low-rank modeling has achieved great success in tensor recovery, many research efforts devote to defining the tensor rank. Among them, the recent popular tensor tubal rank, defined based on the tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD), obtains promising results. However, the framework of the t-SVD and the tensor tubal rank are applicable only to three-way tensors and lack of flexibility to handle different correlations along different modes. To tackle these two issues, we define a new tensor unfolding operator, named mode-$k_1k_2$ tensor unfolding, as the process of lexicographically stacking the mode-$k_1k_2$ slices of an $N$-way tensor into a three-way tensor, which is a three-way extension of the well-known mode-$k$ tensor matricization. Based on it, we define a novel tensor rank, the tensor $N$-tubal rank, as a vector whose elements contain the tubal rank of all mode-$k_1k_2$ unfolding tensors, to depict the correlations along different modes. To efficiently minimize the proposed $N$-tubal rank, we establish its convex relaxation: the weighted sum of tensor nuclear norm (WSTNN). Then, we apply WSTNN to low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) and tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA). The corresponding WSTNN-based LRTC and TRPCA models are proposed, and two efficient alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based algorithms are developed to solve the proposed models. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed models significantly outperform the compared ones

Hierarchical Tensor Ring Completion

Tensor completion can estimate missing values of a high-order data from its partially observed entries. Recent works show that low rank tensor ring approximation is one of the most powerful tools to solve tensor completion problem. However, existing algorithms need predefined tensor ring rank which may be hard to determine in practice. To address the issue, we propose a hierarchical tensor ring decomposition for more compact representation. We use the standard tensor ring to decompose a tensor into several 3-order sub-tensors in the first layer, and each sub-tensor is further factorized by tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD) in the second layer. In the low rank tensor completion based on the proposed decomposition, the zero elements in the 3-order core tensor are pruned in the second layer, which helps to automatically determinate the tensor ring rank. To further enhance the recovery performance, we use total variation to exploit the locally piece-wise smoothness data structure. The alternating direction method of multiplier can divide the optimization model into several subproblems, and each one can be solved efficiently. Numerical experiments on color images and hyperspectral images demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-arts ones in terms of recovery accuracy

Tensor completion via nonconvex tensor ring rank minimization with guaranteed convergence

In recent studies, the tensor ring (TR) rank has shown high effectiveness in tensor completion due to its ability of capturing the intrinsic structure within high-order tensors. A recently proposed TR rank minimization method is based on the convex relaxation by penalizing the weighted sum of nuclear norm of TR unfolding matrices. However, this method treats each singular value equally and neglects their physical meanings, which usually leads to suboptimal solutions in practice. In this paper, we propose to use the logdet-based function as a nonconvex smooth relaxation of the TR rank for tensor completion, which can more accurately approximate the TR rank and better promote the low-rankness of the solution. To solve the proposed nonconvex model efficiently, we develop an alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm and theoretically prove that, under some mild assumptions, our algorithm converges to a stationary point. Extensive experiments on color images, multispectral images, and color videos demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art competitors in both visual and quantitative comparison. Key words: nonconvex optimization, tensor ring rank, logdet function, tensor completion, alternating direction method of multipliers