  In this work we address the subspace recovery problem. Given a set of data
samples (vectors) approximately drawn from a union of multiple subspaces, our
goal is to segment the samples into their respective subspaces and correct the
possible errors as well. To this end, we propose a novel method termed Low-Rank
Representation (LRR), which seeks the lowest-rank representation among all the
candidates that can represent the data samples as linear combinations of the
bases in a given dictionary. It is shown that LRR well solves the subspace
recovery problem: when the data is clean, we prove that LRR exactly captures
the true subspace structures; for the data contaminated by outliers, we prove
that under certain conditions LRR can exactly recover the row space of the
original data and detect the outlier as well; for the data corrupted by
arbitrary errors, LRR can also approximately recover the row space with
theoretical guarantees. Since the subspace membership is provably determined by
the row space, these further imply that LRR can perform robust subspace
segmentation and error correction, in an efficient way.
