164 S. Liu et al. / Information Sciences 451–452 (2018) 161–179
X
i
= [ D α
i, 0
, D α
i, 1
, ···, D α
i,m −1
]
= D [ α
i, 0
, α
i, 1
, ···, α
i,m −1
]
= D A
i
, (5)
where α
i, j
denotes the sparse coefficient of x
i, j
and A
i
is the set of coefficients of all patches in X
i
. Due to the similarity
in the group, the corresponding sparse coefficients α
i, 0
, α
i, j
, . . . , α
i,m −1
have the same sparse profile. Different from inde-
pendent sparse representation of each patch, the nonlocal similarity between each patch is utilized to promote the sparsity
of the group. To conveniently represent the notation usage, a matrix A ∈ C
n ×m
composed of multiple sparse column vectors
with the same sparse profile is used, and a pseudo norm to enhance such group sparsity is developed that jointly regularizes
the sparsity of all columns, given by Mairal et al. [30]
|| A | |
p,q
=
n
k =1
|| α
k
||
p
q
, (6)
where α
k
denotes the k -th row of A . Especially when p = 0 , q = ∞ , || A ||
0, ∞
is the number of nonzero rows of A , which
differs from the l
0
norm counting the number of nonzero elements. Hence, as a regularization, || A ||
0, ∞
will form nonzero
elements of A at the same rows, which is consistent with the group sparsity. Therefore, || • ||
0, ∞
is a fair indication and
regularization to reflect and promote group sparsity.
Unfortunately, minimizing || A ||
0, ∞
is also an NP-hard problem. Therefore, the corresponding convex relaxation || A ||
1, 2
has
been used as the regularization, and some promising results have been reported in image denoising [13,30] . Seeing the bet-
ter performance achieved by non-convex surrogates, the non-convex || A ||
p , 2
(0 < p < 1) should provide better reconstruction
than the utilization of || A ||
1, 2
. Moreover, by means of the equivalence of norms, i.e., || α
k
||
∞
≤ || α
k
||
2
≤m || α
k
||
∞
, the upper
and lower bounds of || A ||
p , 2
are
n
k =1
|| α
k
||
p
∞
≤
n
k =1
|| α
k
||
p
2
≤ m
p
n
k =1
|| α
k
||
p
∞
, which indicates that || A | |
0 , ∞
≤ lim
p→ 0
|| A | |
p, 2
≤
|| A | |
0 , ∞
. According to the Squeeze theorem, one simply deduces that the limit of || A ||
p , 2
at p = 0 is exactly || A ||
0, ∞
. This
fact explains why || A ||
p , 2
(0 < p < 1) better approximates || A ||
0, ∞
than || A ||
1, 2
. Hence, the proposed CS recovery model with
the non-convex of group || A ||
p , 2
is formulated by
min
x , A
i
λ
2
|| y − F
u
x ||
2
2
+
M
i =1
|| A
i
| |
p, 2
s . t .
˜
R
i
x = D A
i
(for i = 1 , 2 , . . . , M )
, (7)
where λ should be inversely proportional to the variance of noise in the k-space data y and M is the number of the extracted
group. By introducing the regularization parameter β, an unconstrained form of Eq. (7) is
min
x , A
i
λ
2
|| y − F
u
x ||
2
2
+
β
2
M
i =1
||
˜
R
i
x −D A
i
||
2
F
+
M
i =1
|| A
i
| |
p, 2
. (8)
Due to the equality constraint of
˜
R
i
x = D A
i
, β should approach infinity. In the implementations, β is usually initialized to
be a small constant, and minimization of Eq. (8) with respect to (w.r.t) x and A
i
is conducted with the increased value of β
at each iteration, which is known as the alternating direction method (ADM) [33,45] . At each iteration, Eq. (8) is decomposed
into two subproblems, and they are
min
A
i
β
2
||
˜
R
i
x −D A
i
||
2
F
+ || A
i
| |
p, 2
(9)
and
min
x
λ
2
|| y − F
u
x ||
2
2
+
β
2
M
i =1
||
˜
R
i
x −D A
i
||
2
F
. (10)
Note that x in Eq. (9) is the image obtained from the previous iteration and that solving Eq. (9) requires a non-convex
optimization known as SSC [30,38,39] . Recent developments show that the orthogonal dictionary with competitive perfor-
mance is better than the redundant dictionary in terms of computation [25,33] . Inspired by this fact, the D in Eq. (9) is set
as an orthogonal dictionary, and then the first Frobenius norm term in Eq. (9) is rewritten as
||
˜
R
i
x −D A
i
||
2
F
= || D
H
˜
R
i
x −A
i
||
2
F
= || W
i
− A
i
||
2
F
, (11)
where the auxiliary variable W
i
= D
H
˜
R
i
x is introduced for simplicity. To discover the form of the optimal solution and sim-
plify the optimization, a decomposition of A
i
and W
i
is conducted as