  As surrogate functions of $L_0$-norm, many nonconvex penalty functions have
been proposed to enhance the sparse vector recovery. It is easy to extend these
nonconvex penalty functions on singular values of a matrix to enhance low-rank
matrix recovery. However, different from convex optimization, solving the
nonconvex low-rank minimization problem is much more challenging than the
nonconvex sparse minimization problem. We observe that all the existing
nonconvex penalty functions are concave and monotonically increasing on
$[0,\infty)$. Thus their gradients are decreasing functions. Based on this
property, we propose an Iteratively Reweighted Nuclear Norm (IRNN) algorithm to
solve the nonconvex nonsmooth low-rank minimization problem. IRNN iteratively
solves a Weighted Singular Value Thresholding (WSVT) problem. By setting the
weight vector as the gradient of the concave penalty function, the WSVT problem
has a closed form solution. In theory, we prove that IRNN decreases the
objective function value monotonically, and any limit point is a stationary
point. Extensive experiments on both synthetic data and real images demonstrate
that IRNN enhances the low-rank matrix recovery compared with state-of-the-art
convex algorithms.
