Deblurring Poissonian images by split Bregman techniques

The restoration of blurred images corrupted by Poisson noise is an important task in various applications such as astronomical imaging, electronic microscopy, single particle emission computed tomography (SPECT) and positron emission tomography (PET). In this paper, we focus on solving this task by minimizing an energy functional consisting of the I-divergence as similarity term and the TV regularization term. Our minimizing algorithm uses alternating split Bregman techniques (alternating direction method of multipliers) which can be reinterpreted as Douglas-Rachford splitting applied to the dual problem. In contrast to recently developed iterative algorithms, our algorithm contains no inner iterations and produces nonnegative images. The high efficiency of our algorithm in comparison to other recently developed algorithms to minimize the same functional is demonstrated by artificial and real-world numerical examples.