  This paper addresses the problem of identifying a lower dimensional space
where observed data can be sparsely represented. This under-complete dictionary
learning task can be formulated as a blind separation problem of sparse sources
linearly mixed with an unknown orthogonal mixing matrix. This issue is
formulated in a Bayesian framework. First, the unknown sparse sources are
modeled as Bernoulli-Gaussian processes. To promote sparsity, a weighted
mixture of an atom at zero and a Gaussian distribution is proposed as prior
distribution for the unobserved sources. A non-informative prior distribution
defined on an appropriate Stiefel manifold is elected for the mixing matrix.
The Bayesian inference on the unknown parameters is conducted using a Markov
chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. A partially collapsed Gibbs sampler is
designed to generate samples asymptotically distributed according to the joint
posterior distribution of the unknown model parameters and hyperparameters.
These samples are then used to approximate the joint maximum a posteriori
estimator of the sources and mixing matrix. Simulations conducted on synthetic
data are reported to illustrate the performance of the method for recovering
sparse representations. An application to sparse coding on under-complete
dictionary is finally investigated.
