On decomposition-based block preconditioned iterative methods for half-quadratic image restoration

Image restoration is a fundamental problem in image processing. Except for many different filters applied to obtain a restored image in image restoration, a degraded image can often be recovered efficiently by minimizing a cost function which consists of a data-fidelity term and a regularization term. In specific, half-quadratic regularization can effectively preserve image edges in the recovered images and a fixed-point iteration method is usually employed to solve the minimization problem. In this paper, the Newton method is applied to solve the half-quadratic regularization image restoration problem. And at each step of the Newton method, a structured linear system of a symmetric positive definite coefficient matrix arises. We design two different decomposition-based block preconditioning matrices by considering the special structure of the coefficient matrix and apply the preconditioned conjugate gradient method to solve this linear system. Theoretical analysis shows the eigenvector properties and the spectral bounds for the preconditioned matrices. The method used to analyze the spectral distribution of the preconditioned matrix and the correspondingly obtained spectral bounds are different from those in the literature. The experimental results also demonstrate that the decomposition-based block preconditioned conjugate gradient method is efficient for solving the half-quadratic regularization image restoration in terms of the numerical performance and image recovering quality.