Sparse Spikes Deconvolution on Thin Grids

This article analyzes the recovery performance of two popular finite dimensional approximations of the sparse spikes deconvolution problem over Radon measures. We examine in a unified framework both the L1 regularization (often referred to as Lasso or Basis-Pursuit) and the Continuous Basis-Pursuit (C-BP) methods. The Lasso is the de-facto standard for the sparse regularization of inverse problems in imaging. It performs a nearest neighbor interpolation of the spikes locations on the sampling grid. The C-BP method, introduced by Ekanadham, Tranchina and Simoncelli, uses a linear interpolation of the locations to perform a better approximation of the infinite-dimensional optimization problem, for positive measures. We show that, in the small noise regime, both methods estimate twice the number of spikes as the number of original spikes. Indeed, we show that they both detect two neighboring spikes around the locations of an original spikes. These results for deconvolution problems are based on an abstract analysis of the so-called extended support of the solutions of L1-type problems (including as special cases the Lasso and C-BP for deconvolution), which are of an independent interest. They precisely characterize the support of the solutions when the noise is small and the regularization parameter is selected accordingly. We illustrate these findings to analyze for the first time the support instability of compressed sensing recovery when the number of measurements is below the critical limit (well documented in the literature) where the support is provably stable

A proximal iteration for deconvolving Poisson noisy images using sparse representations

We propose an image deconvolution algorithm when the data is contaminated by Poisson noise. The image to restore is assumed to be sparsely represented in a dictionary of waveforms such as the wavelet or curvelet transforms. Our key contributions are: First, we handle the Poisson noise properly by using the Anscombe variance stabilizing transform leading to a {\it non-linear} degradation equation with additive Gaussian noise. Second, the deconvolution problem is formulated as the minimization of a convex functional with a data-fidelity term reflecting the noise properties, and a non-smooth sparsity-promoting penalties over the image representation coefficients (e.g. $\ell_1$-norm). Third, a fast iterative backward-forward splitting algorithm is proposed to solve the minimization problem. We derive existence and uniqueness conditions of the solution, and establish convergence of the iterative algorithm. Finally, a GCV-based model selection procedure is proposed to objectively select the regularization parameter. Experimental results are carried out to show the striking benefits gained from taking into account the Poisson statistics of the noise. These results also suggest that using sparse-domain regularization may be tractable in many deconvolution applications with Poisson noise such as astronomy and microscopy