This paper presents a couple of preconditioning techniques that can be used
to enhance the performance of iterative regularization methods applied to image
deblurring problems with a variety of point spread functions (PSFs) and
boundary conditions. More precisely, we first consider the anti-identity
preconditioner, which symmetrizes the coefficient matrix associated to problems
with zero boundary conditions, allowing the use of MINRES as a regularization
method. When considering more sophisticated boundary conditions and strongly
nonsymmetric PSFs, the anti-identity preconditioner improves the performance of
GMRES. We then consider both stationary and iteration-dependent regularizing
circulant preconditioners that, applied in connection with the anti-identity
matrix and both standard and flexible Krylov subspaces, speed up the
iterations. A theoretical result about the clustering of the eigenvalues of the
preconditioned matrices is proved in a special case. The results of many
numerical experiments are reported to show the effectiveness of the new
preconditioning techniques, including when considering the deblurring of sparse
images
