On block diagonal and block triangular iterative schemes and preconditioners for stabilized saddle point problems

We review the use of block diagonal and block lower/upper triangular splittings for constructing iterative methods and preconditioners for solving stabilized saddle point problems. We introduce new variants of these splittings and obtain new results on the convergence of the associated stationary iterations and new bounds on the eigenvalues of the corresponding preconditioned matrices. We further consider inexact versions as preconditioners for flexible Krylov subspace methods, and show experimentally that our techniques can be highly effective for solving linear systems of saddle point type arising from stabilized finite element discretizations of two model problems, one from incompressible fluid mechanics and the other from magnetostatics

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