Dictionary learning for sparse representation: Complexity and algorithms

In this paper we consider the dictionary learning problem for sparse representation. We first show that this problem is NP-hard and then propose an efficient dictionary learning scheme to solve several practical formulations of this problem. Unlike many existing algorithms in the literature, such as K-SVD, our proposed dictionary learning scheme is theoretically guaranteed to converge to the set of stationary points under certain mild assumptions. For the image denoising application, the performance and the efficiency of the proposed dictionary learning scheme are comparable to that of K-SVD algorithm in simulation.