Image recovery using partitioned-separable paraboloidal surrogate coordinate ascent algorithms

Iterative coordinate ascent algorithms have been shown to be useful for image recovery, but are poorly suited to parallel computing due to their sequential nature. This paper presents a new fast converging parallelizable algorithm for image recovery that can be applied to a very broad class of objective functions. This method is based on paraboloidal surrogate functions and a concavity technique. The paraboloidal surrogates simplify the optimization problem. The idea of the concavity technique is to partition pixels into subsets that can be updated in parallel to reduce the computation time. For fast convergence, pixels within each subset are updated sequentially using a coordinate ascent algorithm. The proposed algorithm is guaranteed to monotonically increase the objective function and intrinsically accommodates nonnegativity constraints. A global convergence proof is summarized. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm requires less elapsed time for convergence than iterative coordinate ascent algorithms. With four parallel processors, the proposed algorithm yields a speedup factor of 3.77 relative to single processor coordinate ascent algorithms for a three-dimensional (3-D) confocal image restoration problem.