Fast Approximation for Sparse Coding with Applications to Object Recognition

Sparse Coding (SC) has been widely studied and shown its superiority in the fields of signal processing, statistics, and machine learning. However, due to the high computational cost of the optimization algorithms required to compute the sparse feature, the applicability of SC to real-time object recognition tasks is limited. Many deep neural networks have been constructed to low fast estimate the sparse feature with the help of a large number of training samples, which is not suitable for small-scale datasets. Therefore, this work presents a simple and efficient fast approximation method for SC, in which a special single-hidden-layer neural network (SLNNs) is constructed to perform the approximation task, and the optimal sparse features of training samples exactly computed by sparse coding algorithm are used as ground truth to train the SLNNs. After training, the proposed SLNNs can quickly estimate sparse features for testing samples. Ten benchmark data sets taken from UCI databases and two face image datasets are used for experiment, and the low root mean square error (RMSE) results between the approximated sparse features and the optimal ones have verified the approximation performance of this proposed method. Furthermore, the recognition results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively reduce the computational time of testing process while maintaining the recognition performance, and outperforms several state-of-the-art fast approximation sparse coding methods, as well as the exact sparse coding algorithms.