  Traditional patch-based sparse representation modeling of natural images
usually suffer from two problems. First, it has to solve a large-scale
optimization problem with high computational complexity in dictionary learning.
Second, each patch is considered independently in dictionary learning and
sparse coding, which ignores the relationship among patches, resulting in
inaccurate sparse coding coefficients. In this paper, instead of using patch as
the basic unit of sparse representation, we exploit the concept of group as the
basic unit of sparse representation, which is composed of nonlocal patches with
similar structures, and establish a novel sparse representation modeling of
natural images, called group-based sparse representation (GSR). The proposed
GSR is able to sparsely represent natural images in the domain of group, which
enforces the intrinsic local sparsity and nonlocal self-similarity of images
simultaneously in a unified framework. Moreover, an effective self-adaptive
dictionary learning method for each group with low complexity is designed,
rather than dictionary learning from natural images. To make GSR tractable and
robust, a split Bregman based technique is developed to solve the proposed
GSR-driven minimization problem for image restoration efficiently. Extensive
experiments on image inpainting, image deblurring and image compressive sensing
recovery manifest that the proposed GSR modeling outperforms many current
state-of-the-art schemes in both PSNR and visual perception.
