Bregman Cost for Non-Gaussian Noise

One of the tasks of the Bayesian inverse problem is to find a good estimate based on the posterior probability density. The most common point estimators are the conditional mean (CM) and maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimates, which correspond to the mean and the mode of the posterior, respectively. From a theoretical point of view it has been argued that the MAP estimate is only in an asymptotic sense a Bayes estimator for the uniform cost function, while the CM estimate is a Bayes estimator for the means squared cost function. Recently, it has been proven that the MAP estimate is a proper Bayes estimator for the Bregman cost if the image is corrupted by Gaussian noise. In this work we extend this result to other noise models with log-concave likelihood density, by introducing two related Bregman cost functions for which the CM and the MAP estimates are proper Bayes estimators. Moreover, we also prove that the CM estimate outperforms the MAP estimate, when the error is measured in a certain Bregman distance, a result previously unknown also in the case of additive Gaussian noise

Tomographic Reconstruction Methods for Decomposing Directional Components

Decomposition of tomographic reconstructions has many different practical application. We propose two new reconstruction methods that combines the task of tomographic reconstruction with object decomposition. We demonstrate these reconstruction methods in the context of decomposing directional objects into various directional components. Furthermore we propose a method for estimating the main direction in a directional object, directly from the measured computed tomography data. We demonstrate all the proposed methods on simulated and real samples to show their practical applicability. The numerical tests show that decomposition and reconstruction can combined to achieve a highly useful fibre-crack decomposition

Contrast Invariant SNR

We design an image quality measure independent of local contrast changes, which constitute simple models of illumination changes. Given two images, the algorithm provides the image closest to the first one with the component tree of the second. This problem can be cast as a specific convex program called isotonic regression. We provide a few analytic properties of the solutions to this problem. We also design a tailored first order optimization procedure together with a full complexity analysis. The proposed method turns out to be practically more efficient and reliable than the best existing algorithms based on interior point methods. The algorithm has potential applications in change detection, color image processing or image fusion. A Matlab implementation is available at http://www.math.univ-toulouse.fr/ ∼ weiss/PageCodes.html

Fixing Nonconvergence of Algebraic Iterative Reconstruction with an Unmatched Backprojector

We consider algebraic iterative reconstruction methods with applications in image reconstruction. In particular, we are concerned with methods based on an unmatched projector/backprojector pair; i.e., the backprojector is not the exact adjoint or transpose of the forward projector. Such situations are common in large-scale computed tomography, and we consider the common situation where the method does not converge due to the nonsymmetry of the iteration matrix. We propose a modified algorithm that incorporates a small shift parameter, and we give the conditions that guarantee convergence of this method to a fixed point of a slightly perturbed problem. We also give perturbation bounds for this fixed point. Moreover, we discuss how to use Krylov subspace methods to efficiently estimate the leftmost eigenvalue of a certain matrix to select a proper shift parameter. The modified algorithm is illustrated with test problems from computed tomography

Horseshoe priors for edge-preserving linear Bayesian inversion

In many large-scale inverse problems, such as computed tomography and image deblurring, characterization of sharp edges in the solution is desired. Within the Bayesian approach to inverse problems, edge-preservation is often achieved using Markov random field priors based on heavy-tailed distributions. Another strategy, popular in statistics, is the application of hierarchical shrinkage priors. An advantage of this formulation lies in expressing the prior as a conditionally Gaussian distribution depending of global and local hyperparameters which are endowed with heavy-tailed hyperpriors. In this work, we revisit the shrinkage horseshoe prior and introduce its formulation for edge-preserving settings. We discuss a sampling framework based on the Gibbs sampler to solve the resulting hierarchical formulation of the Bayesian inverse problem. In particular, one of the conditional distributions is high-dimensional Gaussian, and the rest are derived in closed form by using a scale mixture representation of the heavy-tailed hyperpriors. Applications from imaging science show that our computational procedure is able to compute sharp edge-preserving posterior point estimates with reduced uncertainty

Sparse Bayesian Inference with Regularized Gaussian Distributions

Regularization is a common tool in variational inverse problems to impose assumptions on the parameters of the problem. One such assumption is sparsity, which is commonly promoted using lasso and total variation-like regularization. Although the solutions to many such regularized inverse problems can be considered as points of maximum probability of well-chosen posterior distributions, samples from these distributions are generally not sparse. In this paper, we present a framework for implicitly defining a probability distribution that combines the effects of sparsity imposing regularization with Gaussian distributions. Unlike continuous distributions, these implicit distributions can assign positive probability to sparse vectors. We study these regularized distributions for various regularization functions including total variation regularization and piecewise linear convex functions. We apply the developed theory to uncertainty quantification for Bayesian linear inverse problems and derive a Gibbs sampler for a Bayesian hierarchical model. To illustrate the difference between our sparsity-inducing framework and continuous distributions, we apply our framework to small-scale deblurring and computed tomography examples