Block orthonormal overcomplete dictionary learning

In the field of sparse representations, the overcomplete dictionary learning problem is of crucial importance and has a growing application pool where it is used. In this paper we present an iterative dictionary learning algorithm based on the singular value decomposition that efficiently construct unions of orthonormal bases. The important innovation described in this paper, that affects positively the running time of the learning procedures, is the way in which the sparse representations are computed - data are reconstructed in a single orthonormal base, avoiding slow sparse approximation algorithms - how the bases in the union are used and updated individually and how the union itself is expanded by looking at the worst reconstructed data items. The numerical experiments show conclusively the speedup induced by our method when compared to previous works, for the same target representation error.