  We present an extension of sparse PCA, or sparse dictionary learning, where
the sparsity patterns of all dictionary elements are structured and constrained
to belong to a prespecified set of shapes. This \emph{structured sparse PCA} is
based on a structured regularization recently introduced by [1]. While
classical sparse priors only deal with \textit{cardinality}, the regularization
we use encodes higher-order information about the data. We propose an efficient
and simple optimization procedure to solve this problem. Experiments with two
practical tasks, face recognition and the study of the dynamics of a protein
complex, demonstrate the benefits of the proposed structured approach over
unstructured approaches.
