On the convergence of primal-dual hybrid gradient algorithms for total variation image restoration

In this paper we establish the convergence of a general primal-dual method for nonsmooth convex optimization problems whose structure is typical in the imaging framework, as, for example, in the Total Variation image restoration problems. When the steplength parameters are a priori selected sequences, the convergence of the scheme is proved by showing that it can be considered as an epsilon-subgradient method on the primal formulation of the variational problem. Our scheme includes as special case the method recently proposed by Zhu and Chan for Total Variation image restoration from data degraded by Gaussian noise. Furthermore, the convergence hypotheses enable us to apply the same scheme also to other restoration problems, as the denoising and deblurring of images corrupted by Poisson noise, where the data fidelity function is defined as the generalized Kullback-Leibler divergence or the edge preserving removal of impulse noise. The numerical experience shows that the proposed scheme with a suitable choice of the steplength sequences performs well with respect to state-of-the-art methods, especially for Poisson denoising problems, and it exhibits fast initial and asymptotic convergence.