An augmented Lagrangian multi-scale dictionary learning algorithm

Learning overcomplete dictionaries for sparse signal representation has become a hot topic fascinated by many researchers in the recent years, while most of the existing approaches have a serious problem that they always lead to local minima. In this article, we present a novel augmented Lagrangian multi-scale dictionary learning algorithm (ALM-DL), which is achieved by first recasting the constrained dictionary learning problem into an AL scheme, and then updating the dictionary after each inner iteration of the scheme during which majorization-minimization technique is employed for solving the inner subproblem. Refining the dictionary from low scale to high makes the proposed method less dependent on the initial dictionary hence avoiding local optima. Numerical tests for synthetic data and denoising applications on real images demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach.