Inverse Problems with Poisson noise: Primal and Primal-Dual Splitting

In this paper, we propose two algorithms for solving linear inverse problems when the observations are corrupted by Poisson noise. A proper data fidelity term (log-likelihood) is introduced to reflect the Poisson statistics of the noise. On the other hand, as a prior, the images to restore are assumed to be positive and sparsely represented in a dictionary of waveforms. Piecing together the data fidelity and the prior terms, the solution to the inverse problem is cast as the minimization of a non-smooth convex functional. We establish the well-posedness of the optimization problem, characterize the corresponding minimizers, and solve it by means of primal and primal-dual proximal splitting algorithms originating from the field of non-smooth convex optimization theory. Experimental results on deconvolution and comparison to prior methods are also reported.