Fast Steerable Principal Component Analysis

Cryo-electron microscopy nowadays often requires the analysis of hundreds of thousands of 2-D images as large as a few hundred pixels in each direction. Here, we introduce an algorithm that efficiently and accurately performs principal component analysis (PCA) for a large set of 2-D images, and, for each image, the set of its uniform rotations in the plane and their reflections. For a dataset consisting of n images of size L × L pixels, the computational complexity of our algorithm is O(nL
³
+ L
⁴
), while existing algorithms take O(nL
⁴
). The new algorithm computes the expansion coefficients of the images in a Fourier-Bessel basis efficiently using the nonuniform fast Fourier transform. We compare the accuracy and efficiency of the new algorithm with traditional PCA and existing algorithms for steerable PCA.