Image categorization using non-negative kernel sparse representation

Sparse representation of signals have become an important tool in computer vision. In many computer vision applications such as image denoising, image super-resolution and object recognition, sparse representations have produced remarkable performances. Sparse representation models often contain two stages: sparse coding and dictionary learning. In this paper, we propose a non-linear non-negative sparse representation model: NNK-KSVD. In the sparse coding stage, a non-linear update rule is proposed to obtain the sparse matrix. In the dictionary learning stage, the proposed model extends the kernel KSVD by embedding the non-negative sparse coding. The proposed non-negative kernel sparse representation model was evaluated on several public image datasets for the task of classification. Experimental results show that by exploiting the non-linear structure in images and utilizing the ‘additive’ nature of non-negative sparse coding, promising classification performance can be obtained. Moreover, the proposed sparse representation method was also evaluated in image retrieval tasks, competitive results were obtained.