Preconditioning Technique for an Image Deblurring Problem with the Total Fractional-Order Variation Model

Abstract

Total fractional-order variation (TFOV) in image deblurring problems can reduce/remove the staircase problems observed with the image deblurring technique by using the standard total variation (TV) model. However, the discretization of the Euler–Lagrange equations associated with the TFOV model generates a saddle point system of equations where the coefficient matrix of this system is dense and ill conditioned (it has a huge condition number). The ill-conditioned property leads to slowing of the convergence of any iterative method, such as Krylov subspace methods. One treatment for the slowness property is to apply the preconditioning technique. In this paper, we propose a block triangular preconditioner because we know that using the exact triangular preconditioner leads to a preconditioned matrix with exactly two distinct eigenvalues. This means that we need at most two iterations to converge to the exact solution. However, we cannot use the exact preconditioner because the Shur complement of our system is of the form S=K*K+λLα which is a huge and dense matrix. The first matrix, K*K, comes from the blurred operator, while the second one is from the TFOV regularization model. To overcome this difficulty, we propose two preconditioners based on the circulant and standard TV matrices. In our algorithm, we use the flexible preconditioned GMRES method for the outer iterations, the preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) method for the inner iterations, and the fixed point iteration (FPI) method to handle the nonlinearity. Fast convergence was found in the numerical results by using the proposed preconditioners.