O. Scherzer, J. Weickert, Relations between regularization and diffusion filtering, Technical Report DIKU-98/23, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, 1998. Revised version published in Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, Vol. 12, 43-63, 2000.
Regularization may be regarded as diffusion filtering with an implicit time discretization where one single step is used. Thus, iterated regularization with small regularization parameters approximates a diffusion process. The goal of this paper is to analyse relations between noniterated and iterated regularization and diffusion filtering in image processing. In the linear setting, we show that with iterated Tikhonov regularization noise can be better handled than with noniterated. In the nonlinear framework, two filtering strategies are considered: total variation regularization and the diffusion filter of Perona and Malik. It is established that the Perona-Malik equation decreases the total variation during its evolution. While noniterated and iterated total variation regularization is well-posed, one cannot expect to find a minimizing sequence which converges to a minimizer of the corresponding energy functional for the Perona-Malik filter. To address this shortcoming, a novel regularization of the Perona-Malik process is presented which allows to construct a weakly lower semi-continuous energy functional. In analogy to recently established results for a well-posed class of regularized Perona-Malik filters, we introduce Lyapunov functionals and convergence results for regularization methods. Experiments on real-world images illustrate that iterated linear regularization performs better than noniterated, while no significant differences between noniterated and iterated total variation regularization have been observed.
The full technical report is available online as well.
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