Tensor Factorization via Transformed Tensor-Tensor Product for Image Alignment

In this paper, we study the problem of a batch of linearly correlated image alignment, where the observed images are deformed by some unknown domain transformations, and corrupted by additive Gaussian noise and sparse noise simultaneously. By stacking these images as the frontal slices of a third-order tensor, we propose to utilize the tensor factorization method via transformed tensor-tensor product to explore the low-rankness of the underlying tensor, which is factorized into the product of two smaller tensors via transformed tensor-tensor product under any unitary transformation. The main advantage of transformed tensor-tensor product is that its computational complexity is lower compared with the existing literature based on transformed tensor nuclear norm. Moreover, the tensor $\ell_p$ $(0<p<1)$ norm is employed to characterize the sparsity of sparse noise and the tensor Frobenius norm is adopted to model additive Gaussian noise. A generalized Gauss-Newton algorithm is designed to solve the resulting model by linearizing the domain transformations and a proximal Gauss-Seidel algorithm is developed to solve the corresponding subproblem. Furthermore, the convergence of the proximal Gauss-Seidel algorithm is established, whose convergence rate is also analyzed based on the Kurdyka-$\L$ojasiewicz property. Extensive numerical experiments on real-world image datasets are carried out to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method as compared to several state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and computational time.