Half-linear regularization for nonconvex image restoration models

Abstract

Image restoration is the problem of recovering an original image from an observation of it in order to extract the most meaningful information. In this paper, we study this problem from a variational point of view through the minimization of energies composed of a quadratic data-fidelity term and a nonsmooth nonconvex regularization term. In the discrete setting, existence of minimizer is proved for arbitrary linear operators. For this kind of problems, fully segmented solutions can be found by minimizing objective nonconvex functionals. We propose a dual formulation of the model by introducing an auxiliary variable with a double function. On one hand, it marks the edges and it ensures their preservation from smoothing. On the other hand, it makes the criterion half-linear in the sense that the dual energy depends linearly on the gradient of the image to be recovered. This leads to design an efficient optimization algorithm with wide applicability to several image restoration tasks such as denoising and deconvolution. Finally, we present experimental results and we compare them with TV-based image restoration algorithms.