  In sparse signal representation, the choice of a dictionary often involves a
tradeoff between two desirable properties -- the ability to adapt to specific
signal data and a fast implementation of the dictionary. To sparsely represent
signals residing on weighted graphs, an additional design challenge is to
incorporate the intrinsic geometric structure of the irregular data domain into
the atoms of the dictionary. In this work, we propose a parametric dictionary
learning algorithm to design data-adapted, structured dictionaries that
sparsely represent graph signals. In particular, we model graph signals as
combinations of overlapping local patterns. We impose the constraint that each
dictionary is a concatenation of subdictionaries, with each subdictionary being
a polynomial of the graph Laplacian matrix, representing a single pattern
translated to different areas of the graph. The learning algorithm adapts the
patterns to a training set of graph signals. Experimental results on both
synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the dictionaries learned by the
proposed algorithm are competitive with and often better than unstructured
dictionaries learned by state-of-the-art numerical learning algorithms in terms
of sparse approximation of graph signals. In contrast to the unstructured
dictionaries, however, the dictionaries learned by the proposed algorithm
feature localized atoms and can be implemented in a computationally efficient
manner in signal processing tasks such as compression, denoising, and
classification.
