Low complexity regularization of linear inverse problems

Abstract

Inverse problems and regularization theory is a central theme in imaging sciences, statistics, and machine learning. The goal is to reconstruct an unknown vector from partial indirect, and possibly noisy, measurements of it. A now standard method for recovering the unknown vector is to solve a convex optimization problem that enforces some prior knowledge about its structure. This chapter delivers a review of recent advances in the field where the regularization prior promotes solutions conforming to some notion of simplicity/low complexity. These priors encompass as popular examples sparsity and group sparsity (to capture the compressibility of natural signals and images), total variation and analysis sparsity (to promote piecewise regularity), and low rank (as natural extension of sparsity to matrix-valued data). Our aim is to provide a unified treatment of all these regularizations under a single umbrella, namely the theory of partial smoothness. This framework is very general and accommodates all low complexity regularizers just mentioned, as well as many others. Partial smoothness turns out to be the canonical way to encode low-dimensional models that can be linear spaces or more general smooth manifolds. This review is intended to serve as a one stop shop toward the understanding of the theoretical properties of the so-regularized solutions. It covers a large spectrum including (i) recovery guarantees and stability to noise, both in terms of ℓ2-stability and model (manifold) identification; (ii) sensitivity analysis to perturbations of the parameters involved (in particular the observations), with applications to unbiased risk estimation; (iii) convergence properties of the forward-backward proximal splitting scheme that is particularly well suited to solve the corresponding large-scale regularized optimization problem.