This paper introduces a new strategy for setting the regularization parameter
when solving large-scale discrete ill-posed linear problems by means of the
Arnoldi-Tikhonov method. This new rule is essentially based on the discrepancy
principle, although no initial knowledge of the norm of the error that affects
the right-hand side is assumed; an increasingly more accurate approximation of
this quantity is recovered during the Arnoldi algorithm. Some theoretical
estimates are derived in order to motivate our approach. Many numerical
experiments, performed on classical test problems as well as image deblurring
are presented