This paper presents a hierarchical Bayesian model to reconstruct sparse
images when the observations are obtained from linear transformations and
corrupted by an additive white Gaussian noise. Our hierarchical Bayes model is
well suited to such naturally sparse image applications as it seamlessly
accounts for properties such as sparsity and positivity of the image via
appropriate Bayes priors. We propose a prior that is based on a weighted
mixture of a positive exponential distribution and a mass at zero. The prior
has hyperparameters that are tuned automatically by marginalization over the
hierarchical Bayesian model. To overcome the complexity of the posterior
distribution, a Gibbs sampling strategy is proposed. The Gibbs samples can be
used to estimate the image to be recovered, e.g. by maximizing the estimated
posterior distribution. In our fully Bayesian approach the posteriors of all
the parameters are available. Thus our algorithm provides more information than
other previously proposed sparse reconstruction methods that only give a point
estimate. The performance of our hierarchical Bayesian sparse reconstruction
method is illustrated on synthetic and real data collected from a tobacco virus
sample using a prototype MRFM instrument.Comment: v2: final version; IEEE Trans. Image Processing, 200