Stochastic nonlinear image restoration using the wavelet transform

The dominant methodology for image restoration is to stabilize the problem by including a roughness penalty in addition to faithfulness to the data. Among various choices, concave stabilizers stand out for their boundary detection capabilities, but the resulting cost function to be minimized is generally multimodal. Although simulated annealing is theoretically optimal to take up this challenge, standard stochastic algorithms suffer from two drawbacks: i) practical convergence difficulties are encountered with second-order prior models and ii) it remains computationally demanding to favor the formation of smooth contour lines by taking the discontinuity field explicitly into account. This work shows that both weaknesses can be overcome in a multiresolution framework by means of the 2-D discrete wavelet transform (DWT). We first propose to improve convergence toward global minima by single-site updating on the wavelet domain. For this purpose, a new restricted DWT space is introduced and a theoretically sound updating mechanism is constructed on this subspace. Next, we suggest to incorporate the smoothness of the discontinuity field via an additional penalty term defined on the high frequency subbands. The resulting increase in complexity is small and the approach requires the specification of a unique extra parameter for which an explicit selection formula is derived.