Randomized Rank-Revealing UZV Decomposition for Low-Rank Approximation of Matrices

Low-rank matrix approximation plays an increasingly important role in signal and image processing applications. This paper presents a new rank-revealing decomposition method called randomized rank-revealing UZV decomposition (RRR-UZVD). RRR-UZVD is powered by randomization to approximate a low-rank input matrix. Given a large and dense matrix ${\bf A} \in \mathbb R^{m \times n}$ whose numerical rank is $k$, where $k$ is much smaller than $m$ and $n$, RRR-UZVD constructs an approximation $\hat{\bf A}$ such as $\hat{\bf A}={\bf UZV}^T$, where ${\bf U}$ and ${\bf V}$ have orthonormal columns, the leading-diagonal block of ${\bf Z}$ reveals the rank of $\bf A$, and its off-diagonal blocks have small $\ell_2$-norms. RRR-UZVD is simple, accurate, and only requires a few passes through $\bf A$ with an arithmetic cost of $O(mnk)$ floating-point operations. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct experiments on synthetic data, as well as real data in applications of image reconstruction and robust principal component analysis.