Parallelizable Bayesian tomography algorithms with rapid, guaranteed convergence

Bayesian tomographic reconstruction algorithms generally require the efficient optimization of a functional of many variables. In this setting, as well as in many other optimization tasks, functional substitution (FS) has been widely applied to simplify each step of the iterative process. The function to be minimized is replaced locally by an approximation having a more easily manipulated form, e.g., quadratic, but which maintains sufficient similarity to descend the true functional while computing only the substitute. In this paper, we provide two new applications of FS methods in iterative coordinate descent for Bayesian tomography. The first is a modification of our coordinate descent algorithm with one-dimensional (1-D) Newton–Raphson approximations to an alternative quadratic which allows convergence to be proven easily. In simulations, we find essentially no difference in convergence speed between the two techniques. We also present a new algorithm which exploits the FS method to allow parallel updates of arbitrary sets of pixels using computations similar to iterative coordinate descent. The theoretical potential speed up of parallel implementations is nearly linear with the number of processors if communication costs are neglected.