The augmented lagrange multipliers method for matrix completion from corrupted samplings with application to mixed Gaussian-impulse noise removal

PLoS One. 2014 Sep 23;9(9):e108125. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0108125. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of the restoration of images corrupted by mixed Gaussian-impulse noise. In recent years, low-rank matrix reconstruction has become a research hotspot in many scientific and engineering domains such as machine learning, image processing, computer vision and bioinformatics, which mainly involves the problem of matrix completion and robust principal component analysis, namely recovering a low-rank matrix from an incomplete but accurate sampling subset of its entries and from an observed data matrix with an unknown fraction of its entries being arbitrarily corrupted, respectively. Inspired by these ideas, we consider the problem of recovering a low-rank matrix from an incomplete sampling subset of its entries with an unknown fraction of the samplings contaminated by arbitrary errors, which is defined as the problem of matrix completion from corrupted samplings and modeled as a convex optimization problem that minimizes a combination of the nuclear norm and the l(1)-norm in this paper. Meanwhile, we put forward a novel and effective algorithm called augmented Lagrange multipliers to exactly solve the problem. For mixed Gaussian-impulse noise removal, we regard it as the problem of matrix completion from corrupted samplings, and restore the noisy image following an impulse-detecting procedure. Compared with some existing methods for mixed noise removal, the recovery quality performance of our method is dominant if images possess low-rank features such as geometrically regular textures and similar structured contents; especially when the density of impulse noise is relatively high and the variance of Gaussian noise is small, our method can outperform the traditional methods significantly not only in the simultaneous removal of Gaussian noise and impulse noise, and the restoration ability for a low-rank image matrix, but also in the preservation of textures and details in the image.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Simulation
  • Humans
  • Image Enhancement / methods*
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Models, Statistical
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods*
  • Principal Component Analysis

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by grants from the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (2013AA122901, 2012AA121201) (http://www.863.gov.cn) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (40971224) (http://www.nsfc.gov.cn). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.