Robust principal component analysis via truncated nuclear norm minimization

Robust principal component analysis(PCA) is widely used in many applications, such as image processing, data mining and bioinformatics. The existing methods for solving the robust PCA are mostly based on nuclear norm minimization. Those methods simultaneously minimize all the singular values, and thus the rank cannot be well approximated in practice. We extend the idea of truncated nuclear norm regularization(TNNR) to the robust PCA and consider truncated nuclear norm minimization(TNNM) instead of nuclear norm minimization(NNM). This method only minimizes the smallest N-r singular values to preserve the low-rank components, where N is the number of singular values and r is the matrix rank. Moreover, we propose an effective way to determine r via the shrinkage operator. Then we develop an effective iterative algorithm based on the alternating direction method to solve this optimization problem. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the TNNM method. Moreover, this method is much more robust in terms of the rank of the reconstructed matrix and the sparsity of the error.