Patent ID: 7788191

Claim:
A method for compressing data, comprising: accessing data by a processor, the data being represented by vectors x, wherein each vector is an ordered set of pixels, and wherein each pixel comprises an n-tuple; permuting the ordering of pixels in a set of data S=(x 1 , . . . x t ), over a range of permutations to obtain a bag of unordered pixels representing the data, wherein the range of allowed permutations is linearly constrained; associating a convex cost function with the permutations, wherein the cost function is derived by modeling data as a Gaussian distribution and identified as the determinant of a regularized covariance of the data; minimizing the convex cost function over the constrained range of permutations to identify a linear subspace of the bag of pixels, wherein the linear subspace corresponds to the most likely invariant ordering of pixels in the set of data S; performing Principle Component Analysis (PCA) to identify a set of N eigenvectors that span the linear subspace; and encoding data designated for compression using the set of N eigenvectors to represent the designated data as a set of corresponding N coefficients in the eigenspace.