Maximum constrained sparse coding for image representation

Sparse coding exhibits good performance in many computer vision applications by finding bases which capture high-level semantics of the data and learning sparse coefficients in terms of the bases. However, due to the fact that bases are non-orthogonal, sparse coding can hardly preserve the samples' similarity, which is important for discrimination. In this paper, a new image representing method called maximum constrained sparse coding (MCSC) is proposed. Sparse representation with more active coefficients means more similarity information, and the infinite norm is added to the solution for this purpose. We solve the optimizer by constraining the codes' maximum and releasing the residual to other dictionary atoms. Experimental results on image clustering show that our method can preserve the similarity of adjacent samples and maintain the sparsity of code simultaneously.