Math 551

Lab 11

Goal: In this lab, you will learn to use the singular value decomposition for image compression.
Getting started: You will need to download the file TarantulaNebula.png and put it in your
working directory.
What you have to submit: The file m551lab11.m, which you will create during the lab
session.

Reminders About the Grading Software

Remember, the labs are graded with the help of software tools. If you do not follow the
instructions, you will lose points. If the instructions ask you to assign a value to a variable, you
must use the variable name given in the instructions. If the instructions ask you to make
a variable named x1 and instead you make a variable named x or X or X1 or any name other
than x1, the grading software will not find your variable and you will lose points. Required
variables are listed in the lab instructions in a gray box like this:
Variables: x1, A, q
At times you will also be asked to answer questions in a comment in your M-file. You must
format your text answers correctly. Questions that you must answer are shown in gray
boxes in the lab. For example, if you see the instruction
Q7: What does the Matlab command lu do?
your file must contain a line similar to the following somewhere

% Q7: It computes the LU decomposition of a matrix.

The important points about the formatting are

• The answer is on a single line.

• The first characters on the line is the comment character %.

• The answer is labeled in the form Qn:, where n stands for the question number from the
gray box.

If you do not format your answers correctly, the grading software will not find them and you
will lose points.

Tasks

1. Open an M-file called m551lab11.m and add the following commands

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 t=linspace(0,2*pi,100);
X=[cos(t);sin(t)];
figure(1);
plot(X(1,:),X(2,:),’b’);
axis equal

this will create a 2 × 100 matrix X = [x1 x2 · · · x100 ] whose columns are unit vectors
pointing in various directions. The plot will show a blue circle corresponding to the
endpoints of these vectors.
Variables: X

2. Now in the M-file, define a variable A holding the matrix

 
2 1
A=
−1 1

and a variable AX holding the product A*X. Note that this product equals

AX = [Ax1 Ax2 · · · Ax100 ],

so the columns of AX show where the matrix A maps each of the columns of X. Add the
following lines to your M-file after the definition of AX.
figure(2);
plot(AX(1,:),AX(2,:),’b’);
axis equal

Now when you run the M-file you should see a blue circle in Figure 1 and a blue ellipse in
Figure 2. This shows that A maps vectors that end on the unit circle to vectors ending
on an ellipse.
Variables: A, AX

3. Add the following line to your M-file and re-run the file.
[U,S,V] = svd(A)

Your output should look like this

U =

-0.9571 0.2898
0.2898 0.9571

S =

2.3028 0
0 1.3028

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 V =

-0.9571 -0.2898
-0.2898 0.9571

The function svd computes the singular value decomposition of A:

A = USVT

where U = [u1 u2 ] and V = [v1 v2 ] are orthogonal matrices and

 
σ1 0
S=
0 σ2

is a non-negative diagonal matrix. Moreover

 
T σ1 0
[Av1 Av2 ] = AV = USV V = US = [u1 u2 ] = [σ1 u1 σ2 u2 ],
0 σ2

showing that
Av1 = σ1 u1 and Av2 = σ2 u2 .

You can check this fact in the command window as follows.

>> A - U*S*V’

ans =

1.0e-15 *

0.8882 0.4441
-0.4441 0.2220

>> U’*U

ans =

1.0000 0
0 1.0000

>> V’*V

ans =

1 0
0 1

Variables: U, S, V

4. Plot the columns of V on Figure 1 by adding the following to your M-file.

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 figure(1);
hold on;
quiver(0,0,V(1,1),V(2,1),0,’r’);
quiver(0,0,V(1,2),V(2,2),0,’g’);
hold off;

The vector corresponding to the first column will be plotted in red and the second column
in green.
5. Plot the columns of US on Figure 2 by adding the following to your M-file.
figure(2);
hold on;
quiver(0,0,S(1,1)*U(1,1),S(1,1)*U(2,1),0,’r’);
quiver(0,0,S(2,2)*U(1,2),S(2,2)*U(2,2),0,’g’);
hold off;

The vector corresponding to the first column will be plotted in red and the second column
in green.
6. Now we’ll work on a bigger matrix. Add the following commands to your M-file and run
it. (If you want, you can create a new cell by entering two percent signs (%%) at the
beginning of a line and just run the cell from now on.)
%% (start a new cell)

Img = double(imread(’TarantulaNebula.png’));
figure(3);
image(Img);
colormap(gray(256));

This code loads an image as a real matrix and displays it on the screen. Each entry in
the matrix corresponds to a pixel on the screen and takes a value somewhere between 0
(black) and 255 (white).
Variables: Img
7. Perform the singular value decomposition of Img, save the output in matrices UImg, SImg,
and VImg.
Variables: UImg, SImg, VImg

8. Add the following code and run the M-file.

figure(4);
semilogy(diag(SImg));

This shows the singular values (the diagonal entries of the S matrix) for our image matrix
(the scale of the y axis is logarithmic). Notice that the diagonal entries of S are ordered
so that σ1 ≥ σ2 ≥ σ3 ≥ · · · . One way of writing the SVD is

A = σ1 u1 v1T + σ2 u2 v2T + · · · + σr ur vrT

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 where r is the rank of A and ui and vi are the ith columns of U and V respectively.
If for some k < r, σk+1 is very small compared to σ1 , we should expect

A ≈ σ1 u1 v1T + σ2 u2 v2T + · · · + σk uk vkT

to be a good approximation of A. (This is called a truncated SVD.) This idea can be

used for image compression as follows. Instead of storing the whole m × n matrix A, we
instead store the m × k and n × k matrices

C = [u1 u2 · · · uk ] and D = [σ1 v1 σ2 v2 · · · σk vk ].

If k(m + n) is much smaller than mn, then storing C and D will take much less space
than storing A. Moreover, if we wish to display the image, we can reconstruct A (ap-
proximately) as A ≈ CDT .
9. Add the following code to your M-file.
%% (start a new cell)

k = 10;

% compressed image
C = UImg(:,1:k);
D = VImg(:,1:k)*SImg(1:k,1:k);

% compression percentage
pct = 1 - (numel(C)+numel(D))/numel(Img);

figure(5);
image(C*D’);
colormap(gray(256));
title( sprintf( ’%.2f%% compression’, 100*pct ) );

figure(6);
image(Img);
colormap(gray(256));
title( ’Original’ );

This code compresses the image as described above using k = 10 singular values, then
displays the reconstructed image along with the original. It also shows the percent de-
crease in storage size required for the compressed image. Try several values of k to see
how the quality and compression percentage vary with k. Set k so that the compression
percentage is 80.23% before turning in your M-file.
Variables: k, C, D