  The nuclear norm is widely used as a convex surrogate of the rank function in
compressive sensing for low rank matrix recovery with its applications in image
recovery and signal processing. However, solving the nuclear norm based relaxed
convex problem usually leads to a suboptimal solution of the original rank
minimization problem. In this paper, we propose to perform a family of
nonconvex surrogates of $L_0$-norm on the singular values of a matrix to
approximate the rank function. This leads to a nonconvex nonsmooth minimization
problem. Then we propose to solve the problem by Iteratively Reweighted Nuclear
Norm (IRNN) algorithm. IRNN iteratively solves a Weighted Singular Value
Thresholding (WSVT) problem, which has a closed form solution due to the
special properties of the nonconvex surrogate functions. We also extend IRNN to
solve the nonconvex problem with two or more blocks of variables. In theory, we
prove that IRNN decreases the objective function value monotonically, and any
limit point is a stationary point. Extensive experiments on both synthesized
data and real images demonstrate that IRNN enhances the low-rank matrix
recovery compared with state-of-the-art convex algorithms.
