From Coarse to Fine: Global Guided Patch-based Robust Tensor Completion for Visual Data

Tensor completion is the problem of estimating the missing values of high-order data from partially observed entries. Data corruption due to prevailing outliers poses major challenges to traditional tensor completion algorithms, which catalyzed the development of robust tensor completion algorithms that alleviate the effect of outliers. However, existing robust methods largely presume that the corruption is sparse and most entries are noiseless or uncontaminated, which may not hold in practice. In this paper, we develop a two-stage robust tensor completion approach to deal with tensor completion of visual data with a large amount of gross corruption. A novel coarse-to-fine framework is proposed which uses a global coarse completion result to guide a local patch refinement process. To efficiently mitigate the effect of a large amount of outliers on tensor recovery, we develop a new M-estimator-based robust tensor ring recovery method which can adpatively identify the outliers and alleviate their negative effect during optimization. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach over state-of-the-art robust algorithms for tensor completion.