  Sparse coding, which is the decomposition of a vector using only a few basis
elements, is widely used in machine learning and image processing. The basis
set, also called dictionary, is learned to adapt to specific data. This
approach has proven to be very effective in many image processing tasks.
Traditionally, the dictionary is an unstructured "flat" set of atoms. In this
paper, we study structured dictionaries which are obtained from an epitome, or
a set of epitomes. The epitome is itself a small image, and the atoms are all
the patches of a chosen size inside this image. This considerably reduces the
number of parameters to learn and provides sparse image decompositions with
shiftinvariance properties. We propose a new formulation and an algorithm for
learning the structured dictionaries associated with epitomes, and illustrate
their use in image denoising tasks.
