Low Complexity Regularization of Linear Inverse Problems

Inverse problems and regularization theory is a central theme in contemporary signal processing, where the goal is to reconstruct an unknown signal from partial indirect, and possibly noisy, measurements of it. A now standard method for recovering the unknown signal is to solve a convex optimization problem that enforces some prior knowledge about its structure. This has proved efficient in many problems routinely encountered in imaging sciences, statistics and machine learning. This chapter delivers a review of recent advances in the field where the regularization prior promotes solutions conforming to some notion of simplicity/low-complexity. These priors encompass as popular examples sparsity and group sparsity (to capture the compressibility of natural signals and images), total variation and analysis sparsity (to promote piecewise regularity), and low-rank (as natural extension of sparsity to matrix-valued data). Our aim is to provide a unified treatment of all these regularizations under a single umbrella, namely the theory of partial smoothness. This framework is very general and accommodates all low-complexity regularizers just mentioned, as well as many others. Partial smoothness turns out to be the canonical way to encode low-dimensional models that can be linear spaces or more general smooth manifolds. This review is intended to serve as a one stop shop toward the understanding of the theoretical properties of the so-regularized solutions. It covers a large spectrum including: (i) recovery guarantees and stability to noise, both in terms of $\ell^2$-stability and model (manifold) identification; (ii) sensitivity analysis to perturbations of the parameters involved (in particular the observations), with applications to unbiased risk estimation ; (iii) convergence properties of the forward-backward proximal splitting scheme, that is particularly well suited to solve the corresponding large-scale regularized optimization problem

Proceedings of the second "international Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST'14)

The implicit objective of the biennial "international - Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST) is to foster collaboration between international scientific teams by disseminating ideas through both specific oral/poster presentations and free discussions. For its second edition, the iTWIST workshop took place in the medieval and picturesque town of Namur in Belgium, from Wednesday August 27th till Friday August 29th, 2014. The workshop was conveniently located in "The Arsenal" building within walking distance of both hotels and town center. iTWIST'14 has gathered about 70 international participants and has featured 9 invited talks, 10 oral presentations, and 14 posters on the following themes, all related to the theory, application and generalization of the "sparsity paradigm": Sparsity-driven data sensing and processing; Union of low dimensional subspaces; Beyond linear and convex inverse problem; Matrix/manifold/graph sensing/processing; Blind inverse problems and dictionary learning; Sparsity and computational neuroscience; Information theory, geometry and randomness; Complexity/accuracy tradeoffs in numerical methods; Sparsity? What's next?; Sparse machine learning and inference.Comment: 69 pages, 24 extended abstracts, iTWIST'14 website: http://sites.google.com/site/itwist1

Stochastic forward-backward and primal-dual approximation algorithms with application to online image restoration

Stochastic approximation techniques have been used in various contexts in data science. We propose a stochastic version of the forward-backward algorithm for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is not necessarily smooth. Our framework can handle stochastic approximations of the gradient of the smooth function and allows for stochastic errors in the evaluation of the proximity operator of the nonsmooth function. The almost sure convergence of the iterates generated by the algorithm to a minimizer is established under relatively mild assumptions. We also propose a stochastic version of a popular primal-dual proximal splitting algorithm, establish its convergence, and apply it to an online image restoration problem.Comment: 5 Figure

Fast and easy blind deblurring using an inverse filter and PROBE

PROBE (Progressive Removal of Blur Residual) is a recursive framework for blind deblurring. Using the elementary modified inverse filter at its core, PROBE's experimental performance meets or exceeds the state of the art, both visually and quantitatively. Remarkably, PROBE lends itself to analysis that reveals its convergence properties. PROBE is motivated by recent ideas on progressive blind deblurring, but breaks away from previous research by its simplicity, speed, performance and potential for analysis. PROBE is neither a functional minimization approach, nor an open-loop sequential method (blur kernel estimation followed by non-blind deblurring). PROBE is a feedback scheme, deriving its unique strength from the closed-loop architecture rather than from the accuracy of its algorithmic components

A Stochastic Majorize-Minimize Subspace Algorithm for Online Penalized Least Squares Estimation

Stochastic approximation techniques play an important role in solving many problems encountered in machine learning or adaptive signal processing. In these contexts, the statistics of the data are often unknown a priori or their direct computation is too intensive, and they have thus to be estimated online from the observed signals. For batch optimization of an objective function being the sum of a data fidelity term and a penalization (e.g. a sparsity promoting function), Majorize-Minimize (MM) methods have recently attracted much interest since they are fast, highly flexible, and effective in ensuring convergence. The goal of this paper is to show how these methods can be successfully extended to the case when the data fidelity term corresponds to a least squares criterion and the cost function is replaced by a sequence of stochastic approximations of it. In this context, we propose an online version of an MM subspace algorithm and we study its convergence by using suitable probabilistic tools. Simulation results illustrate the good practical performance of the proposed algorithm associated with a memory gradient subspace, when applied to both non-adaptive and adaptive filter identification problems

Undersampled Phase Retrieval with Outliers

We propose a general framework for reconstructing transform-sparse images from undersampled (squared)-magnitude data corrupted with outliers. This framework is implemented using a multi-layered approach, combining multiple initializations (to address the nonconvexity of the phase retrieval problem), repeated minimization of a convex majorizer (surrogate for a nonconvex objective function), and iterative optimization using the alternating directions method of multipliers. Exploiting the generality of this framework, we investigate using a Laplace measurement noise model better adapted to outliers present in the data than the conventional Gaussian noise model. Using simulations, we explore the sensitivity of the method to both the regularization and penalty parameters. We include 1D Monte Carlo and 2D image reconstruction comparisons with alternative phase retrieval algorithms. The results suggest the proposed method, with the Laplace noise model, both increases the likelihood of correct support recovery and reduces the mean squared error from measurements containing outliers. We also describe exciting extensions made possible by the generality of the proposed framework, including regularization using analysis-form sparsity priors that are incompatible with many existing approaches.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure

Local Behavior of Sparse Analysis Regularization: Applications to Risk Estimation

In this paper, we aim at recovering an unknown signal x0 from noisy L1measurements y=Phi*x0+w, where Phi is an ill-conditioned or singular linear operator and w accounts for some noise. To regularize such an ill-posed inverse problem, we impose an analysis sparsity prior. More precisely, the recovery is cast as a convex optimization program where the objective is the sum of a quadratic data fidelity term and a regularization term formed of the L1-norm of the correlations between the sought after signal and atoms in a given (generally overcomplete) dictionary. The L1-sparsity analysis prior is weighted by a regularization parameter lambda>0. In this paper, we prove that any minimizers of this problem is a piecewise-affine function of the observations y and the regularization parameter lambda. As a byproduct, we exploit these properties to get an objectively guided choice of lambda. In particular, we develop an extension of the Generalized Stein Unbiased Risk Estimator (GSURE) and show that it is an unbiased and reliable estimator of an appropriately defined risk. The latter encompasses special cases such as the prediction risk, the projection risk and the estimation risk. We apply these risk estimators to the special case of L1-sparsity analysis regularization. We also discuss implementation issues and propose fast algorithms to solve the L1 analysis minimization problem and to compute the associated GSURE. We finally illustrate the applicability of our framework to parameter(s) selection on several imaging problems