Splines Are Universal Solutions of Linear Inverse Problems with Generalized TV Regularization

Splines come in a variety of flavors that can be characterized in terms of some differential operator L. The simplest piecewise-constant model corresponds to the derivative operator. Likewise, one can extend the traditional notion of total variation by considering more general operators than the derivative. This results in the definitions of a generalized total variation seminorm and its corresponding native space, which is further identified as the direct sum of two Banach spaces. We then prove that the minimization of the generalized total variation (gTV), subject to some arbitrary (convex) consistency constraints on the linear measurements of the signal, admits nonuniform L-spline solutions with fewer knots than the number of measurements. This shows that nonuniform splines are universal solutions of continuous-domain linear inverse problems with LASSO, $L _{ 1 }$ , or total-variationlike regularization constraints. Remarkably, the type of spline is fully determined by the choice of L and does not depend on the actual nature of the measurements

Periodic Splines and Gaussian Processes for the Resolution of Linear Inverse Problems

This paper deals with the resolution of inverse problems in a periodic setting or, in other terms, the reconstruction of periodic continuous-domain signals from their noisy measurements. We focus on two reconstruction paradigms: variational and statistical. In the variational approach, the reconstructed signal is solution to an optimization problem that establishes a tradeoff between fidelity to the data and smoothness conditions via a quadratic regularization associated to a linear operator. In the statistical approach, the signal is modeled as a stationary random process defined from a Gaussian white noise and a whitening operator; one then looks for the optimal estimator in the mean-square sense. We give a generic form of the reconstructed signals for both approaches, allowing for a rigorous comparison of the two.We fully characterize the conditions under which the two formulations yield the same solution, which is a periodic spline in the case of sampling measurements. We also show that this equivalence between the two approaches remains valid on simulations for a broad class of problems. This extends the practical range of applicability of the variational method

Continuous-Domain Solutions of Linear Inverse Problems with Tikhonov vs. Generalized TV Regularization

We consider linear inverse problems that are formulated in the continuous domain. The object of recovery is a function that is assumed to minimize a convex objective functional. The solutions are constrained by imposing a continuous-domain regularization. We derive the parametric form of the solution (representer theorems) for Tikhonov (quadratic) and generalized total-variation (gTV) regularizations. We show that, in both cases, the solutions are splines that are intimately related to the regularization operator. In the Tikhonov case, the solution is smooth and constrained to live in a fixed subspace that depends on the measurement operator. By contrast, the gTV regularization results in a sparse solution composed of only a few dictionary elements that are upper-bounded by the number of measurements and independent of the measurement operator. Our findings for the gTV regularization resonates with the minimization of the $l_1$ norm, which is its discrete counterpart and also produces sparse solutions. Finally, we find the experimental solutions for some measurement models in one dimension. We discuss the special case when the gTV regularization results in multiple solutions and devise an algorithm to find an extreme point of the solution set which is guaranteed to be sparse

On the Uniqueness of Inverse Problems with Fourier-domain Measurements and Generalized TV Regularization

We study the super-resolution problem of recovering a periodic continuous-domain function from its low-frequency information. This means that we only have access to possibly corrupted versions of its Fourier samples up to a maximum cut-off frequency. The reconstruction task is specified as an optimization problem with generalized total-variation regularization involving a pseudo-differential operator. Our special emphasis is on the uniqueness of solutions. We show that, for elliptic regularization operators (e.g., the derivatives of any order), uniqueness is always guaranteed. To achieve this goal, we provide a new analysis of constrained optimization problems over Radon measures. We demonstrate that either the solutions are always made of Radon measures of constant sign, or the solution is unique. Doing so, we identify a general sufficient condition for the uniqueness of the solution of a constrained optimization problem with TV-regularization, expressed in terms of the Fourier samples.Comment: 20 page