FlRR: fast low-rank representation using Frobenius-norm

Low-rank representation (LRR) intends to find the representation with lowest rank of a given data set, which can be formulated as a rank-minimisation problem. Since the rank operator is non-convex and discontinuous, most of the recent works use the nuclear norm as a convex relaxation. It is theoretically shown that, under some conditions, the Frobenius-norm-based optimisation problem has a unique solution that is also a solution of the original LRR optimisation problem. In other words, it is feasible to apply the Frobenius norm as a surrogate of the non-convex matrix rank function. This replacement will largely reduce the time costs for obtaining the lowest-rank solution. Experimental results show that the method (i.e. fast LRR (fLRR)) performs well in terms of accuracy and computation speed in image clustering and motion segmentation compared with nuclear-norm-based LRR algorithm.