Image deblurring by sparsity constraint on the Fourier coefficients

This paper is concerned with the image deconvolution problem. For the basic model, where the convolution matrix can be diagonalized by discrete Fourier transform, the Tikhonov regularization method is computationally attractive since the associated linear system can be easily solved by fast Fourier transforms. On the other hand, the provided solutions are usually oversmoothed and other regularization terms are often employed to improve the quality of the restoration. Of course, this weighs down on the computational cost of the regularization method. Starting from the fact that images have sparse representations in the Fourier and wavelet domains, many deconvolution methods have been recently proposed with the aim of minimizing the ℓ₁-norm of these transformed coefficients. This paper uses the iteratively reweighted least squares strategy to introduce a diagonal weighting matrix in the Fourier domain. The resulting linear system is diagonal and hence the regularization parameter can be easily estimated, for instance by the generalized cross validation. The method benefits from a proper initial approximation that can be the observed image or the Tikhonov approximation. Therefore, embedding this method in an outer iteration may yield further improvement of the solution. Finally, since some properties of the observed image, like continuity or sparsity, are obviously changed when working in the Fourier domain, we introduce a filtering factor which keeps unchanged the large singular values and preserves the jumps in the Fourier coefficients related to the low frequencies. Numerical examples are given in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.