A weakly convergent fully inexact Douglas-Rachford method with relative error tolerance

Douglas-Rachford method is a splitting algorithm for finding a zero of the sum of two maximal monotone operators. Each of its iterations requires the sequential solution of two proximal subproblems. The aim of this work is to present a fully inexact version of Douglas-Rachford method wherein both proximal subproblems are solved approximately within a relative error tolerance. We also present a semi-inexact variant in which the first subproblem is solved exactly and the second one inexactly. We prove that both methods generate sequences weakly convergent to the solution of the underlying inclusion problem, if any

Blind Ptychographic Phase Retrieval via Convergent Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

Ptychography has risen as a reference X-ray imaging technique: it achieves resolutions of one billionth of a meter, macroscopic field of view, or the capability to retrieve chemical or magnetic contrast, among other features. A ptychographyic reconstruction is normally formulated as a blind phase retrieval problem, where both the image (sample) and the probe (illumination) have to be recovered from phaseless measured data. In this article we address a nonlinear least squares model for the blind ptychography problem with constraints on the image and the probe by maximum likelihood estimation of the Poisson noise model. We formulate a variant model that incorporates the information of phaseless measurements of the probe to eliminate possible artifacts. Next, we propose a generalized alternating direction method of multipliers designed for the proposed nonconvex models with convergence guarantee under mild conditions, where their subproblems can be solved by fast element-wise operations. Numerically, the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in both speed and image quality.Comment: 23 page