Orthogonal nonnegative matrix factorization for blind image separation

Abstract

This paper describes an application of orthogonal nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm in blind image separation (BIS) problem. The algorithm itself has been presented in our previous work as an attempt to provide a simple and convergent algorithm for orthogonal NMF, a type of NMF proposed to improve clustering capability of the standard NMF. When we changed the application domain of the algorithm to the BIS problem, surprisingly good results were obtained; the reconstructed images were more similar to the original ones and pleasant to view compared to the results produced by other NMF algorithms. Good results were also obtained when another dataset that consists of unrelated images was used. This practical use along with its convergence guarantee and implementation simplicity demonstrate the benefits of our algorithm.