Robust Low-Rank Matrix Completion via an Alternating Manifold Proximal Gradient Continuation Method

Robust low-rank matrix completion (RMC), or robust principal component analysis with partially observed data, has been studied extensively for computer vision, signal processing and machine learning applications. This problem aims at decomposing a partially observed matrix into the superposition of a low-rank matrix and a sparse matrix, where the sparse matrix captures the grossly corrupted entries of the matrix. A widely used approach to tackle RMC is to consider a convex formulation, which minimizes the nuclear norm of the low-rank matrix (to promote low-rankness) plus the
l
₁
norm of the sparse matrix (to promote sparsity). In this paper, motivated by some recent works on low-rank matrix completion and Riemannian optimization, we formulate this problem as a nonsmooth Riemannian optimization problem over Grassmann manifold. This new formulation is scalable as the low-rank matrix is factorized to the multiplication of two much smaller matrices. We then propose an alternating manifold proximal gradient continuation method to solve the proposed new formulation. Convergence rate of the proposed algorithm is rigorously analyzed. Numerical results on both synthetic data and real data on background extraction from surveillance videos are reported to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed new formulation and algorithm over several popular existing approaches.