This paper is devoted to proposing a general weighted low-rank recovery model and designs a fast SVD-free computational scheme to solve it. First, our generic weighted low-rank recovery model unifies several existing approaches in the literature.~Moreover, our model readily extends to the non-convex setting. Algorithm-wise, most first-order proximal algorithms in the literature for low-rank recoveries require computing singular value decomposition (SVD). As SVD does not scale properly with the dimension of the matrices, these algorithms becomes slower when the problem size becomes larger. By incorporating the variational formulation of the nuclear norm into the sub-problem of proximal gradient descent, we avoid to compute SVD which results in significant speed-up. Moreover, our algorithm preserves the {em rank identification property} of nuclear norm [33] which further allows us to design a rank continuation scheme that asymptotically achieves the minimal iteration complexity. Numerical experiments on both toy example and real-world problems including structure from motion (SfM) and photometric stereo, background estimation and matrix completion, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm.
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