An inexact non stationary Tikhonov procedure for large-scale nonlinear ill-posed problems

In this work we consider the stable numerical solution of large-scale ill-posed nonlinear least squares problems with nonzero residual. We propose a non-stationary Tikhonov method with inexact step computation, specially designed for large-scale problems. At each iteration the method requires the solution of an elliptical trust-region subproblem to compute the step. This task is carried out employing a Lanczos approach, by which an approximated solution is computed. The trust region radius is chosen to ensure the resulting Tikhonov regularization parameter to satisfy a prescribed condition on the model, which is proved to ensure regularizing properties to the method. The proposed approach is tested on a parameter identification problem and on an image registration problem, and it is shown to provide important computational savings with respect to its exact counterpart.