Research article

A non-convex tensor RPCA model with TL1 penalty for image restoration

  • Published: 26 May 2026
  • 65K05, 90C30

  • For high-dimensional image restoration, tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA) is a highly effective method. However, since it uniformly penalizes all singular values, it tends to over-penalize larger singular values, thereby failing to adequately preserve the primary structural information of the image. In contrast, the non-convex transformed $ L_1 $ penalty (TL1) function demonstrates a stronger ability to protect larger singular values and reduce estimation bias, offering a more accurate approximation of the rank function. Inspired by this, we propose a TRPCA with TL1 penalty model (TL1-TRPCA), which non-convexly substitutes the low-rank function with the TL1, and apply the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve the model. Extensive experiments on color image, hyperspectral image, and gray video datasets show that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to several state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zbx913/Tensor-RPCA-with-TL1-Penalty.

    Citation: Xiao Guo, Chuanpei Xu, Zhibin Zhu, Benxin Zhang. A non-convex tensor RPCA model with TL1 penalty for image restoration[J]. Journal of Industrial and Management Optimization, 2026, 22(6): 2942-2962. doi: 10.3934/jimo.2026108

    Related Papers:

  • For high-dimensional image restoration, tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA) is a highly effective method. However, since it uniformly penalizes all singular values, it tends to over-penalize larger singular values, thereby failing to adequately preserve the primary structural information of the image. In contrast, the non-convex transformed $ L_1 $ penalty (TL1) function demonstrates a stronger ability to protect larger singular values and reduce estimation bias, offering a more accurate approximation of the rank function. Inspired by this, we propose a TRPCA with TL1 penalty model (TL1-TRPCA), which non-convexly substitutes the low-rank function with the TL1, and apply the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve the model. Extensive experiments on color image, hyperspectral image, and gray video datasets show that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to several state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zbx913/Tensor-RPCA-with-TL1-Penalty.



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