CT Image Reconstruction by Spatial-Radon Domain Data-Driven Tight Frame Regularization

This paper proposes a spatial-Radon domain CT image reconstruction model based on data-driven tight frames (SRD-DDTF). The proposed SRD-DDTF model combines the idea of joint image and Radon domain inpainting model of \cite{Dong2013X} and that of the data-driven tight frames for image denoising \cite{cai2014data}. It is different from existing models in that both CT image and its corresponding high quality projection image are reconstructed simultaneously using sparsity priors by tight frames that are adaptively learned from the data to provide optimal sparse approximations. An alternative minimization algorithm is designed to solve the proposed model which is nonsmooth and nonconvex. Convergence analysis of the algorithm is provided. Numerical experiments showed that the SRD-DDTF model is superior to the model by \cite{Dong2013X} especially in recovering some subtle structures in the images

A Total Fractional-Order Variation Model for Image Restoration with Non-homogeneous Boundary Conditions and its Numerical Solution

To overcome the weakness of a total variation based model for image restoration, various high order (typically second order) regularization models have been proposed and studied recently. In this paper we analyze and test a fractional-order derivative based total $\alpha$-order variation model, which can outperform the currently popular high order regularization models. There exist several previous works using total $\alpha$-order variations for image restoration; however first no analysis is done yet and second all tested formulations, differing from each other, utilize the zero Dirichlet boundary conditions which are not realistic (while non-zero boundary conditions violate definitions of fractional-order derivatives). This paper first reviews some results of fractional-order derivatives and then analyzes the theoretical properties of the proposed total $\alpha$-order variational model rigorously. It then develops four algorithms for solving the variational problem, one based on the variational Split-Bregman idea and three based on direct solution of the discretise-optimization problem. Numerical experiments show that, in terms of restoration quality and solution efficiency, the proposed model can produce highly competitive results, for smooth images, to two established high order models: the mean curvature and the total generalized variation.Comment: 26 page

BM3D Frames and Variational Image Deblurring

A family of the Block Matching 3-D (BM3D) algorithms for various imaging problems has been recently proposed within the framework of nonlocal patch-wise image modeling [1], [2]. In this paper we construct analysis and synthesis frames, formalizing the BM3D image modeling and use these frames to develop novel iterative deblurring algorithms. We consider two different formulations of the deblurring problem: one given by minimization of the single objective function and another based on the Nash equilibrium balance of two objective functions. The latter results in an algorithm where the denoising and deblurring operations are decoupled. The convergence of the developed algorithms is proved. Simulation experiments show that the decoupled algorithm derived from the Nash equilibrium formulation demonstrates the best numerical and visual results and shows superiority with respect to the state of the art in the field, confirming a valuable potential of BM3D-frames as an advanced image modeling tool.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Image Processing on May 18, 2011. implementation of the proposed algorithm is available as part of the BM3D package at http://www.cs.tut.fi/~foi/GCF-BM3

Inexact Bregman iteration with an application to Poisson data reconstruction

This work deals with the solution of image restoration problems by an iterative regularization method based on the Bregman iteration. Any iteration of this scheme requires to exactly compute the minimizer of a function. However, in some image reconstruction applications, it is either impossible or extremely expensive to obtain exact solutions of these subproblems. In this paper, we propose an inexact version of the iterative procedure, where the inexactness in the inner subproblem solution is controlled by a criterion that preserves the convergence of the Bregman iteration and its features in image restoration problems. In particular, the method allows to obtain accurate reconstructions also when only an overestimation of the regularization parameter is known. The introduction of the inexactness in the iterative scheme allows to address image reconstruction problems from data corrupted by Poisson noise, exploiting the recent advances about specialized algorithms for the numerical minimization of the generalized Kullback–Leibler divergence combined with a regularization term. The results of several numerical experiments enable to evaluat