Efficient Minimization Methods of Mixed l2-l1 and l1-l1 Norms for Image Restoration

Image restoration problems are often solved by finding the minimizer of a suitable objective function. Usually this function consists of a data-fitting term and a regularization term. For the least squares solution, both the data-fitting and the regularization terms are in the 2 norm. In this paper, we consider the least absolute deviation (LAD) solution and the least mixed norm (LMN) solution. For the LAD solution, both the data-fitting and the regularization terms are in the 1 norm. For the LMN solution, the regularization term is in the 1 norm but the data-fitting term is in the 2 norm. Since images often have nonnegative intensity values, the proposed algorithms provide the option of taking into account the nonnegativity constraint. The LMN and LAD solutions are formulated as the solution to a linear or quadratic programming problem which is solved by interior point methods. At each iteration of the interior point method, a structured linear system must be solved. The preconditioned conjugate gradient method with factorized sparse inverse preconditioners is employed to solve such structured inner systems. Experimental results are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We also show the quality of the restored images, using the minimization of mixed 21 and 11 norms, is better than that using only the 2 norm.