Unifying tensor factorization and tensor nuclear norm approaches for low-rank tensor completion

Smooth Tensor Product for Tensor Completion

Low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) has shown promise in processing incomplete visual data, yet it often overlooks the inherent local smooth structures in images and videos. Recent advances in LRTC, integrating total variation regularization to capitalize on the local smoothness, have yielded notable improvements. Nonetheless, these methods are limited to exploiting local smoothness within the original data space, neglecting the latent factor space of tensors. More seriously, there is a lack of theoretical backing for the role of local smoothness in enhancing recovery performance. In response, this paper introduces an innovative tensor completion model that concurrently leverages the global low-rank structure of the original tensor and the local smooth structure of its factor tensors. Our objective is to learn a low-rank tensor that decomposes into two factor tensors, each exhibiting sufficient local smoothness. We propose an efficient alternating direction method of multipliers to optimize our model. Further, we establish generalization error bounds for smooth factor-based tensor completion methods across various decomposition frameworks. These bounds are significantly tighter than existing baselines. We conduct extensive inpainting experiments on color images, multispectral images, and videos, which demonstrate the efficacy and superiority of our method. Additionally, our approach shows a low sensitivity to hyper-parameter settings, enhancing its convenience and reliability for practical applications.