  Low rank matrix approximation (LRMA), which aims to recover the underlying
low rank matrix from its degraded observation, has a wide range of applications
in computer vision. The latest LRMA methods resort to using the nuclear norm
minimization (NNM) as a convex relaxation of the nonconvex rank minimization.
However, NNM tends to over-shrink the rank components and treats the different
rank components equally, limiting its flexibility in practical applications. We
propose a more flexible model, namely the Weighted Schatten $p$-Norm
Minimization (WSNM), to generalize the NNM to the Schatten $p$-norm
minimization with weights assigned to different singular values. The proposed
WSNM not only gives better approximation to the original low-rank assumption,
but also considers the importance of different rank components. We analyze the
solution of WSNM and prove that, under certain weights permutation, WSNM can be
equivalently transformed into independent non-convex $l_p$-norm subproblems,
whose global optimum can be efficiently solved by generalized iterated
shrinkage algorithm. We apply WSNM to typical low-level vision problems, e.g.,
image denoising and background subtraction. Extensive experimental results
show, both qualitatively and quantitatively, that the proposed WSNM can more
effectively remove noise, and model complex and dynamic scenes compared with
state-of-the-art methods.
