Two-Level method for blind image deblurring problems

Abstract

Blind image deblurring (BID) is a procedure for reducing blur and noise in a deteriorated image. In this process, the estimation of the original image, as well as the blurring kernel of the degraded image, is done without or with only partial information about the imaging system and degradation. This is an inverse problem (ill-posed) that corresponds to the direct problem of deblurring. To overcome the ill-posedness of BID and attain useful solutions, the regularization models based on mean curvature (MC) are utilized. The discretization of MC-based models often leads to a large ill-conditioned nonlinear system of equations, which is computationally expensive. Moreover, the existence of MC functionals in the governing equations of the BID model complicates the calculation of the nonlinear system. To overcome these problems, in this paper, we propose the Two-Level blind image deblurring method (TLBID). First, on the coarse-grid, we solve a small nonlinear system (with a small number of pixels) for a mesh size of H, followed by solving a large linear system of equations on the finer grid (with a large number of pixels) of size h (h≤H). On the coarse mesh, we solve the BID problem utilizing the computationally expensive MC regularization functional. After this, we interpolate the results to the finer mesh. On the finer mesh, we solve the BID problem with less computationally expensive regularization functionals such as total variation (TV) or Tikhonov. This approach produces an approximate solution of the BID equations with high accuracy, which is cost-effective. The TLBID algorithm is implemented with MATLAB, and verification and validation are carried out using benchmark problems and medical digital images.