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As a powerful statistical signal modeling technique, sparse representation has been widely used in various image restoration (IR) applications. The sparsity-based methods have achieved leading performance in the past few decades. However, in recent years it has been surpassed by other methods, especially the recent deep learning based methods. In this paper, we address the question that whether sparse representation can be competitive again. The way we answer this question is to redesign it with a deep architecture. To be specific, we propose an end-to-end deep architecture that follows the process of the sparse representation based IR. In particular, we learn a sparse convolutional dictionary to replace the traditional dictionary, and a convolutional neural network (CNN) denoising prior to replace the image prior. Through end-to-end training, the parameters in convolutional dictionary and CNN denoiser can be jointly optimized. Experimental results on several representative IR tasks, including image denoising, deblurring and super-resolution, demonstrate that the proposed deep network can achieve superior performance against state-of-the-art model-based and learning-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metric learning has attracted significant attention in the past decades, because of its appealing advances in various real-world tasks, e.g., person re-identification and face recognition. Traditional supervised metric learning attempts to seek a discriminative metric, which could minimize the pairwise distance of within-class data samples, while maximizing the pairwise distance of data samples from various classes. However, it is still a challenge to build a robust and discriminative metric, especially for corrupted data in the real-world application. In this paper, we propose a Robust Discriminative Metric Learning algorithm through fast low-rank representation and denoising strategy. To be specific, the metric learning problem is guided by a discriminative regularization by incorporating the pair-wise or class-wise information. Moreover, the low-rank basis learning is jointly optimized with the metric to better uncover the global data structure and remove noise. Furthermore, the fast low-rank representation is implemented to mitigate the computational burden and ensure the scalability on large-scale datasets. Finally, we evaluate our learned metric on several challenging tasks, e.g., face recognition/verification, object recognition, image clustering, and person re-identification. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in comparison to many metric learning algorithms, even deep learning ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]