Abstract
The total variation-based Rudin–Osher–Fatemi model is an effective and popular prior model in the image processing problem. Different to frequently using the splitting scheme to directly solve this model, we propose the primal dual method to solve the smoothing total variation-based Rudin–Osher–Fatemi model and give some convergence analysis of proposed method. Numerical implements show that our proposed model and method can efficiently improve the numerical results compared with the Rudin–Osher–Fatemi model.
Introduction
The degradation of an image is usually unavoidable during its acquisition, and perhaps the most fundamental image restoration problem is denoising. It forms a significant preliminary step in many machine vision tasks such as object detection and recognition. A major concern in designing image denoising models is to preserve important image features such as edges while removing noise. Variational PDE based models1–3 have been widely used over the past decades for image denoising with edge preservation. A classical variational denoising method is the total variation (TV)-based minimizing process proposed by Rudin–Osher–Fatemi (ROF),
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where they used the properties that TV can reduce oscillations and regularize the geometry of level sets without penalizing discontinuities. Formally, the ROF can be written as
However, from the view of numerical computation, solving (1) is a difficult task to find a good method since its corresponding Euler–Lagrangian equation includes the term
This article focuses on the problem (2) by assuming
Then the Euler–Lagrange equation of problem (2) approximates to Laplace equation in flat region of image where
The contents of the article are organized as follows. In “PDM” section, we give some preliminaries of the PDM and use it to solve our proposed model. We arrange some numerical implementations in “Numerical implementations” section. Some concluding remarks are presented in “Conclusions” section.
PDM
PDM was first presented by Arrow et al.
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and named as the primal-dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) method in Arrow et al.
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and Zhu et al.
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This method enjoys to solve the primal variable and the dual variable alternatively and then widely applied to compute the saddle point of min–max problems.17–19 A gradient descent method is employed to find the primal and the dual variables alternatively in Zhu et al.
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and Esser et al.
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A predictor-corrector scheme is used in the alternating direction iterations for finding the dual variable in Chen and Teboulle.
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Recently, Chambolle and Pock
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presented an unified form of PDM. They demonstrated that, with a properly specified step-size policy and an averaging scheme, this method can achieve the
PDM
Let X and Y be two finite-dimensional real vector spaces equipped with the Euclidian inner product
Assume that functions
Similar to the work in Chambolle and Pock,
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the primal problem (5) and its dual problem (6) can be connected by a generic saddle-point problem as
Furthermore, the above fact holds if and only if
Obviously, the strategy (8a)–(8c) can be regarded as using the gradient descent method to solve the primal problem
For the proof, see Theorem 1 in Chambolle and Pock.
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Obviously, the PDM is matrix inversion-free if the functions F(x) and
The problem (2) based on the PDM
In this section, we consider solving the problem (2) based on the PDM. For simplicity, we assume that the image region Ω is squared. The problem (2) is computed numerically by projecting an image of
We also use the following notational brevities to represent For the original variation u: In the problem (10), ignoring the unrelated term to u, we can obtain
for For the dual variation
Based on two above subproblems, we summarize the PDM to solve the problem (9) as follows.
Set original values
Thus, we easily find to the formulation (8a) as
For the dual variable
Based on the above remarks, we have the following assertion for Algorithm 2.1.
Numerical implementations
In numerical implementations, we will terminate the iteration if the stop conditions is satisfied in term of the
For numerical comparisons, we consider to compare our proposed PDM with the numerical methods such as the time marching method (TM)
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and the lagged diffusion fixed point method (FPM) in Vogel and Oman
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to solve the smoothing TV-based ROF model.
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Actually, our PDM degenerates to the PDM used in Chambolle and Pock
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to solve the ROF model while α = 0. Apart from some default settings, like the maximum number of iterations, the related parameters in the codes are chosen by trials and errors to give the best results of the respective methods. Here, we choose three different images with the size 256 × 256 as testing images shown in Figure 1. To measure more quantitatively, the similarity between the recovered image and the original (supposedly noise-free) image, we use both the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the structural similarity index (SSIM), the latter being well known to better reflect perceived visual quality.
Original images in our implementations. (a) Cameraman (b) Lena (c) Synthetic image.
Numerical curves of The related results in Example 3.1. Here (σ, λ) denotes the level of noise and regularization parameter in the problem (2).
The related results in Example 3.2.
Numerical results by using the models (1) and (2) to solve the noisy images. To clear comparison, we only show the upper-left part of restoration images with size 
Conclusions
In this article, we have introduced the PDM based on the work in Chambolle and Pock 8 to solve the smoothing TV-based ROF model (2). Numerical implementations show that our method is superior to the classic methods such as the time marching method 4 and the FPM 5 on the stability and high efficiency, especially to restore the large-scale image. Furthermore, the proposed model can effectively reduce the staircase effect by choosing suitable smoothing parameter α.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to the anonymous referee for his/her careful checking of details and helpful comments that improved this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: NSF of China (No. 11401170) and Foundation of Henan Educational Committee of China (No.14A110018).
