Learning Parts-Based and Global Representation for Image Classification

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), known as a famous matrix factorization technique, has been widely used in pattern recognition and computer vision. NMF represents the input data matrix as a product of two nonnegative factors. As NMF is based on the Euclidean distance, which is sensitive to noise or errors in the data, some robust NMF methods are proposed. Mainly focusing on parts-based representation, these robust NMF methods often neglect global representation of data. In fact, the global geometry information of data is more robust than the local information about the noisy data in terms of image classification. In order to effectively improve the robustness of NMF and learn part-based and global representation of the data, a novel method low-rank nonnegative factorization (LRNF) is proposed in this paper. First, we assume that the data are grossly corrupted, and the $L_{1} $ norm is used as a sparse constraint on the assumed noise matrix. Then, LRNF learns a low-rank matrix with the global representation ability. Finally, we make a nonnegative factorization of the learned low-rank matrix. We can obtain a base matrix, which preserves locality and globality properties of the data in the meantime. Extensive experiments have been conducted on nine real-world image databases to verify the performance of the proposed LRNF method by comparing with the state-of-the-art algorithms on robust dimensionality reduction.