Symmetric Gauss–Seidel Technique-Based Alternating Direction Methods of Multipliers for Transform Invariant Low-Rank Textures Problem

Transform invariant low-rank textures, referred to as TILT, can accurately and robustly extract textural or geometric information in a 3D from user-specified windows in 2D in spite of significant corruptions and warping. It was discovered that the task can be characterized, both theoretically and numerically, by solving a sequence of matrix nuclear-norm and $$\ell _1$$ℓ1-norm involved convex minimization problems. For solving this problem, the direct extension of alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) in an usual Gauss–Seidel manner often performs numerically well in practice but there is no theoretical guarantee on its convergence. In this paper, we resolve this dilemma by using the novel symmetric Gauss–Seidel (sGS)-based ADMM developed by Li et al. (Math Program 155:333–373, 2016). The sGS-ADMM is guaranteed to converge, and we shall demonstrate in this paper that it is also practically efficient than the directly extended ADMM. When the sGS technique is applied to this particular problem, we show that only one variable needs to be re-updated, and this updating hardly imposes any excessive computational cost. The sGS decomposition theorem of Li et al. (Math. Program., 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10107-018-1247-7) establishes the equivalent between sGS-ADMM and the classical ADMM with an additional semi-proximal term, so the convergence result is followed directly. Extensive experiments illustrate that the sGS-ADMM and its generalized variant have superior numerical efficiency over the directly extended ADMM.