Coarse to Fine Two-Stage Approach to Robust Tensor Completion of 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 algorithms that alleviate the effect of outliers. However, existing robust methods largely presume that the corruption is sparse, which may not hold in practice. In this article, 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 number of outliers on tensor recovery, we develop a new M-estimator-based robust tensor ring recovery method which can adaptively identify the outliers and alleviate their negative effect in the optimization. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach over state-of-the-art robust algorithms for tensor completion.