be the optimal classifier using the nearest distance as the proxim-
ity measurement.
2. 2DCS: two-dimensional compressive sampling
In 1DCS, images are first recast as vectors and then projected to
a lower dimensional space, namely image x 2 R
MN
is represented
by vector x
1D
2 R
MN
.
Alternatively, we propose that the matrix x 2 R
MN
can be pro-
jected by a column-wise approach using a matrix U
1
2 R
mM
ðm < MÞ as follows [34].
z ¼ U
1
x ð11Þ
After Eq. (11), the row number of z is reduced to m. In the con-
text of 2DCS, we call Eq. (11) the step of ‘‘row compression’’.
Similarly, the right multiplication of z by U
2
2 R
Nn
ðn < NÞ
leads to ‘‘column compression’’, yielding a matrix y 2 R
mn
as
follows.
y ¼ U
1
xU
2
: ð12Þ
Due to its similarity to 1DCS, we call Eq. (12) 2DCS (two-dimen-
sional compressive sampling). As a kind of stepwise implementa-
tion of 1DCS, 2DCS reduces feature extraction to a series of
subtasks. Thus, the computational complexity of 2DCS is signifi-
cantly less than that of 1DCS, which is superlinear function of
the input scale.
If the sparsity of x is appropriately harnessed, the reconstruc-
tion of x from y is guaranteed.
The 2DCS reconstruction requires two steps of reconstructions,
i.e., the column reconstruction and row reconstruction as follows.
(S1) Column reconstruction
z
row;i
¼ argmin
z
row;i
2R
1N
W
ðz
row;i
Þ
1
subject to y
i
¼ z
row;i
U
2
8i ¼ 1; 2; ...; m ð13Þ
where z
row;i
is the ith recovered row of z¼
:
U
1
x; y
i
is the ith row of y
and
W
ðÞ is a sparsifying transformation, which transforms a target
vector or matrix (not explicitly sparse) to sparse one. For image
data,
W
could be TV (Total Variation) transform. If the target vector
x is already sparse itself, then
W
is the identity transformation.
After the above step, z¼
:
U
1
x is recovered.
(S2) Row reconstruction
x
j
¼ argmin
x
j
2 R
M
W
ðx
j
Þ
1
subject to z
col;j
¼ U
1
x
j
8j ¼ 1; 2; ...; N ð14Þ
where x
j
is the recovered jth column of x and z
col;j
is the jth column
of z.
After the two steps, x is recovered.
To be more specific, given (column) vector u, which is not
explicitly sparse (e.g., u is a vector from image data), and its mea-
surements b ¼ Du, the reconstruction of u via b; D can be imple-
mented via TV (Total Variation) minimization [36].TV
minimization is defined as follows.
u
¼ argmin
u
X
i
D
i
ðuÞkk
1
subject to Du ¼ b ð15Þ
where
D
i
ðuÞ is the discrete gradient vector of u at position i.
Hereinafter, given projection matrix D and vector b, we denote
the solution of Eq. (15) by TVðD; bÞ. Thus, we summarize our algo-
rithm of 2DCS image reconstruction via TV minimization as Algo-
rithm 1.
Algorithm 1. 2DCS Image Reconstruction via TV minimization
Input: Projection matrices U
1
2 R
mM
, U
2
2 R
Nn
and
y 2 R
mn
.
Output: Reconstructed x 2 R
MN
.
1: Y y
T
; D U
T
2
;
2: for i 1 to m do . Column Reconstruction
3: b YðiÞ; .YðiÞ is the i-th column of matrix Y
4: UðiÞ TVðD; bÞ; . UðiÞ is the ith column of matrix U
5: end for
6: z U
T
; . Column Reconstruction Completed
7: D U
1
;
8: for i 1 to N do .Row Reconstruction
9: b zðiÞ; . zðiÞ is the ith column of matrix z
10: xðiÞ TVðD; bÞ; . xðiÞ is the ith column of matrix x
11: end for
12: return x; .Row Reconstruction Completed
3. NCSC: Nearest Constrained Subspace Classifier
In this section, we extend NN, NFL and NS to a unified classifier
called NCSC (Nearest Constrained Subspace Classifier), in which,
the employed constrained subspaces with the tuned intrinsic
dimension parameter are better approximations to the data mani-
folds than those of NN, NFL and NS.
3.1. Manifold perspective and manifold approximation
From the geometric point of view, the vectors representing the
natural images of the same class generally reside on (or near to) a
low dimensional geometric structure known as manifold, embed-
ded in the high dimensional feature space [37–39]. If the data man-
ifolds for all the classes can be learned, then it would be possible to
design more effective classifiers. The concept of manifold has long
been a powerful analytical tool for understanding image classes,
for example images of human face or handwritten digits [40–42].
In the last decade, some well-known manifold learning algo-
rithms have emerged, such as ISOMAP [37], LLE (Local Linear
Embedding) [38], Laplacian Eigenmap [39], Hessian Eigenmaps
(HLLE) [43], Maximum Variance Unfolding (MVU) [44] and Local
Tangent Space Alignment (LTSA) [45]. However they are not
designed to solve the problem of classifying new images. Although
there are some works which attempt to deal with this problem
[46–48], the algorithms are all unsupervised and designed for a
single manifold, not for multiple manifolds. These algorithms are
unsuitable for supervised multi-class classification, in which each
class is modeled by a manifold.
As discussed in Section 1.3, NM (Nearest Manifold), with the
nearest distance criterion, is believed to be optimal in terms of
classification accuracy. But due to the unavailability of NM, we
argue that some approximation strategies should be exploited.
Since the training data are the points on manifolds, if there are
enough well-distributed training data, then the manifold can be
accurately approximated.
From this viewpoint, we argue, to achieve an accurate manifold
approximation, it is necessary to make the intrinsic dimension of
M
i
equal to the intrinsic dimension of manifold M
i
(
8
i ¼ 1; ...; K,
given K classes). Otherwise the accuracy of the approximation to
the manifold can not be guaranteed. We call this criterion the
dimension equality.
L. Liao et al. / J. Vis. Commun. Image R. 25 (2014) 1187–1198
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