Konstantinos Papafitsoros

Konstantinos Papafitsoros, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

In this paper we study a variational problem in the space of functions of bounded Hessian. Our model constitutes a straightforward higher-order extension of the well known ROF functional (total variation minimisation) to which we add a non-smooth second order regulariser. It combines convex functions of the total variation and the total variation of the first derivatives. In what follows, we prove existence and uniqueness of minimisers of the combined model and present the numerical solution of the corresponding discretised problem by employing the split Bregman method. The paper is furnished with applications of our model to image denoising, deblurring as well as image inpainting. The obtained numerical results are compared with results obtained from total generalised variation (TGV), infimal convolution and Euler's elastica, three other state of the art higher-order models. The numerical discussion confirms that the proposed higher-order model competes with models of its kind in avoiding the creation of undesirable artifacts and blocky-like structures in the reconstructed images -- a known disadvantage of the ROF model -- while being simple and efficiently numerically solvable.

Martin Burger, Konstantinos Papafitsoros, Evangelos Papoutsellis et al.

In this paper we analyse an infimal convolution type regularisation functional called $\mathrm{TVL}^{\infty}$, based on the total variation ($\mathrm{TV}$) and the $\mathrm{L}^{\infty}$ norm of the gradient. The functional belongs to a more general family of $\mathrm{TVL}^{p}$ functionals ($1<p\le \infty$). We show via analytical and numerical results that the minimisation of the $\mathrm{TVL}^{\infty}$ functional promotes piecewise affine structures in the reconstructed images similar to the state of the art total generalised variation ($\mathrm{TGV}$) but improving upon preservation of hat--like structures. We also propose a spatially adapted version of our model that produces results comparable to $\mathrm{TGV}$ and allows space for further improvement.

Martin Burger, Konstantinos Papafitsoros, Evangelos Papoutsellis et al.

We study a general class of infimal convolution type regularisation functionals suitable for applications in image processing. These functionals incorporate a combination of the total variation ($\mathrm{TV}$) seminorm and $\mathrm{L}^{p}$ norms. A unified well-posedness analysis is presented and a detailed study of the one dimensional model is performed, by computing exact solutions for the corresponding denoising problem and the case $p=2$. Furthermore, the dependency of the regularisation properties of this infimal convolution approach to the choice of $p$ is studied. It turns out that in the case $p=2$ this regulariser is equivalent to Huber-type variant of total variation regularisation. We provide numerical examples for image decomposition as well as for image denoising. We show that our model is capable of eliminating the staircasing effect, a well-known disadvantage of total variation regularisation. Moreover as $p$ increases we obtain almost piecewise affine reconstructions, leading also to a better preservation of hat-like structures.

Jan Lellmann, Konstantinos Papafitsoros, Carola Schoenlieb et al.

In this work we introduce a formulation for a non-local Hessian that combines the ideas of higher-order and non-local regularization for image restoration, extending the idea of non-local gradients to higher-order derivatives. By carefully choosing the weights, the model allows to improve on the current state of the art higher-order method, Total Generalized Variation, with respect to overall quality and particularly close to jumps in the data. In the spirit of recent work by Brezis et al., our formulation also has analytic implications: for a suitable choice of weights, it can be shown to converge to classical second-order regularizers, and in fact allows a novel characterization of higher-order Sobolev and BV spaces