Optical interferometers provide multiple wavelength measurements. In order to
fully exploit the spectral and spatial resolution of these instruments, new
algorithms for image reconstruction have to be developed. Early attempts to
deal with multi-chromatic interferometric data have consisted in recovering a
gray image of the object or independent monochromatic images in some spectral
bandwidths. The main challenge is now to recover the full 3-D (spatio-spectral)
brightness distribution of the astronomical target given all the available
data. We describe a new approach to implement multi-wavelength image
reconstruction in the case where the observed scene is a collection of
point-like sources. We show the gain in image quality (both spatially and
spectrally) achieved by globally taking into account all the data instead of
dealing with independent spectral slices. This is achieved thanks to a
regularization which favors spatial sparsity and spectral grouping of the
sources. Since the objective function is not differentiable, we had to develop
a specialized optimization algorithm which also accounts for non-negativity of
the brightness distribution.Comment: This version has been accepted for publication in J. Opt. Soc. Am.