On the Identifiability of Overcomplete Dictionaries via the Minimisation Principle Underlying K-SVD

This article gives theoretical insights into the performance of K-SVD, a dictionary learning algorithm that has gained significant popularity in practical applications. The particular question studied here is when a dictionary $\Phi\in \mathbb{R}^{d \times K}$ can be recovered as local minimum of the minimisation criterion underlying K-SVD from a set of $N$ training signals $y_n =\Phi x_n$. A theoretical analysis of the problem leads to two types of identifiability results assuming the training signals are generated from a tight frame with coefficients drawn from a random symmetric distribution. First, asymptotic results showing, that in expectation the generating dictionary can be recovered exactly as a local minimum of the K-SVD criterion if the coefficient distribution exhibits sufficient decay. Second, based on the asymptotic results it is demonstrated that given a finite number of training samples $N$, such that $N/\log N = O(K^3d)$, except with probability $O(N^{-Kd})$ there is a local minimum of the K-SVD criterion within distance $O(KN^{-1/4})$ to the generating dictionary.