  A nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) can be computed efficiently under
the separability assumption, which asserts that all the columns of the given
input data matrix belong to the cone generated by a (small) subset of them. The
provably most robust methods to identify these conic basis columns are based on
nonnegative sparse regression and self dictionaries, and require the solution
of large-scale convex optimization problems. In this paper we study a
particular nonnegative sparse regression model with self dictionary. As opposed
to previously proposed models, this model yields a smooth optimization problem
where the sparsity is enforced through linear constraints. We show that the
Euclidean projection on the polyhedron defined by these constraints can be
computed efficiently, and propose a fast gradient method to solve our model. We
compare our algorithm with several state-of-the-art methods on synthetic data
sets and real-world hyperspectral images.
