A Non-Local Structure Tensor Based Approach for Multicomponent Image Recovery Problems

Non-Local Total Variation (NLTV) has emerged as a useful tool in variational methods for image recovery problems. In this paper, we extend the NLTV-based regularization to multicomponent images by taking advantage of the Structure Tensor (ST) resulting from the gradient of a multicomponent image. The proposed approach allows us to penalize the non-local variations, jointly for the different components, through various $\ell_{1,p}$ matrix norms with $p \ge 1$. To facilitate the choice of the hyper-parameters, we adopt a constrained convex optimization approach in which we minimize the data fidelity term subject to a constraint involving the ST-NLTV regularization. The resulting convex optimization problem is solved with a novel epigraphical projection method. This formulation can be efficiently implemented thanks to the flexibility offered by recent primal-dual proximal algorithms. Experiments are carried out for multispectral and hyperspectral images. The results demonstrate the interest of introducing a non-local structure tensor regularization and show that the proposed approach leads to significant improvements in terms of convergence speed over current state-of-the-art methods

Nonconvex Nonsmooth Low-Rank Minimization via Iteratively Reweighted Nuclear Norm

The nuclear norm is widely used as a convex surrogate of the rank function in compressive sensing for low rank matrix recovery with its applications in image recovery and signal processing. However, solving the nuclear norm based relaxed convex problem usually leads to a suboptimal solution of the original rank minimization problem. In this paper, we propose to perform a family of nonconvex surrogates of $L_0$-norm on the singular values of a matrix to approximate the rank function. This leads to a nonconvex nonsmooth minimization problem. Then we propose to solve the problem by Iteratively Reweighted Nuclear Norm (IRNN) algorithm. IRNN iteratively solves a Weighted Singular Value Thresholding (WSVT) problem, which has a closed form solution due to the special properties of the nonconvex surrogate functions. We also extend IRNN to solve the nonconvex problem with two or more blocks of variables. In theory, we prove that IRNN decreases the objective function value monotonically, and any limit point is a stationary point. Extensive experiments on both synthesized data and real images demonstrate that IRNN enhances the low-rank matrix recovery compared with state-of-the-art convex algorithms

A Constrained Convex Optimization Approach to Hyperspectral Image Restoration with Hybrid Spatio-Spectral Regularization

We propose a new constrained optimization approach to hyperspectral (HS) image restoration. Most existing methods restore a desirable HS image by solving some optimization problem, which consists of a regularization term(s) and a data-fidelity term(s). The methods have to handle a regularization term(s) and a data-fidelity term(s) simultaneously in one objective function, and so we need to carefully control the hyperparameter(s) that balances these terms. However, the setting of such hyperparameters is often a troublesome task because their suitable values depend strongly on the regularization terms adopted and the noise intensities on a given observation. Our proposed method is formulated as a convex optimization problem, where we utilize a novel hybrid regularization technique named Hybrid Spatio-Spectral Total Variation (HSSTV) and incorporate data-fidelity as hard constraints. HSSTV has a strong ability of noise and artifact removal while avoiding oversmoothing and spectral distortion, without combining other regularizations such as low-rank modeling-based ones. In addition, the constraint-type data-fidelity enables us to translate the hyperparameters that balance between regularization and data-fidelity to the upper bounds of the degree of data-fidelity that can be set in a much easier manner. We also develop an efficient algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to efficiently solve the optimization problem. Through comprehensive experiments, we illustrate the advantages of the proposed method over various HS image restoration methods including state-of-the-art ones.Comment: 20 pages, 4 tables, 10 figures, submitted to MDPI Remote Sensin

Low-rank and sparse reconstruction in dynamic magnetic resonance imaging via proximal splitting methods

Dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) consists of collecting multiple MR images in time, resulting in a spatio-temporal signal. However, MRI intrinsically suffers from long acquisition times due to various constraints. This limits the full potential of dynamic MR imaging, such as obtaining high spatial and temporal resolutions which are crucial to observe dynamic phenomena. This dissertation addresses the problem of the reconstruction of dynamic MR images from a limited amount of samples arising from a nuclear magnetic resonance experiment. The term limited can be explained by the approach taken in this thesis to speed up scan time, which is based on violating the Nyquist criterion by skipping measurements that would be normally acquired in a standard MRI procedure. The resulting problem can be classified in the general framework of linear ill-posed inverse problems. This thesis shows how low-dimensional signal models, specifically lowrank and sparsity, can help in the reconstruction of dynamic images from partial measurements. The use of these models are justified by significant developments in signal recovery techniques from partial data that have emerged in recent years in signal processing. The major contributions of this thesis are the development and characterisation of fast and efficient computational tools using convex low-rank and sparse constraints via proximal gradient methods, the development and characterisation of a novel joint reconstruction–separation method via the low-rank plus sparse matrix decomposition technique, and the development and characterisation of low-rank based recovery methods in the context of dynamic parallel MRI. Finally, an additional contribution of this thesis is to formulate the various MR image reconstruction problems in the context of convex optimisation to develop algorithms based on proximal splitting methods