Global Low-Rank Image Restoration With Gaussian Mixture Model

Low-rank restoration has recently attracted a lot of attention in the research of computer vision. Empirical studies show that exploring the low-rank property of the patch groups can lead to superior restoration performance, however, there is limited achievement on the global low-rank restoration because the rank minimization at image level is too strong for the natural images which seldom match the low-rank condition. In this paper, we describe a flexible global low-rank restoration model which introduces the local statistical properties into the rank minimization. The proposed model can effectively recover the latent global low-rank structure via nuclear norm, as well as the fine details via Gaussian mixture model. An alternating scheme is developed to estimate the Gaussian parameters and the restored image, and it shows excellent convergence and stability. Besides, experiments on image and video sequence datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method in image inpainting problems.