Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) via rank minimization is a
powerful tool for recovering underlying low-rank structure of clean data
corrupted with sparse noise/outliers. In many low-level vision problems, not
only it is known that the underlying structure of clean data is low-rank, but
the exact rank of clean data is also known. Yet, when applying conventional
rank minimization for those problems, the objective function is formulated in a
way that does not fully utilize a priori target rank information about the
problems. This observation motivates us to investigate whether there is a
better alternative solution when using rank minimization. In this paper,
instead of minimizing the nuclear norm, we propose to minimize the partial sum
of singular values, which implicitly encourages the target rank constraint. Our
experimental analyses show that, when the number of samples is deficient, our
approach leads to a higher success rate than conventional rank minimization,
while the solutions obtained by the two approaches are almost identical when
the number of samples is more than sufficient. We apply our approach to various
low-level vision problems, e.g. high dynamic range imaging, motion edge
detection, photometric stereo, image alignment and recovery, and show that our
results outperform those obtained by the conventional nuclear norm rank
minimization method.Comment: Accepted in Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
(TPAMI). To appea