In the present survey, we consider a rank approximation algorithm for tensors represented in the canonical format in arbitrary pre-Hilbert tensor product spaces. It is shown that the original approximation problem is equivalent to a finite dimensional l 2 minimization problem. The l 2 minimization problem is solved by a regularized Newton method which requires the computation and evaluation of the first and second derivative of the objective function. A systematic choice of the initial guess for the iterative scheme is introduced. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated in numerical experiments.