For sparse coding, the weaker the correlation of dictionary atoms is, the better the representation capacity of dictionary will be. A weak correlation dictionary construction method for sparse coding has been proposed in this paper. Firstly, a new dictionary atom initialization is proposed in which data samples with weak correlation are selected as the initial dictionary atoms in order to effectively reduce the correlation among them.Then, in the process of dictionary learning, the correlation between atoms has been measured by correlation coefficient, and strong correlation atoms have been eliminated and replaced by weak correlation atoms in order to improve the representation capacity of the dictionary. An image classification scheme has been achieved by applying the weak correlation dictionary construction method proposed in this paper. Experimental results show that, the proposed method averagely improves image classification accuracy by more than 2%, compared to sparse coding spatial pyramid matching(Sc SPM) and other existing methods for image classification on the datasets of Caltech-101, Scene-15, etc.
