Regularized constrained total least squares image restoration

In this paper, the problem of restoring an image distorted by a linear space-invariant (LSI) point-spread function (PSF) that is not exactly known is formulated as the solution of a perturbed set of linear equations. The regularized constrained total least-squares (RCTLS) method is used to solve this set of equations. Using the diagonalization properties of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) for circulant matrices, the RCTLS estimate is computed in the DFT domain. This significantly reduces the computational cost of this approach and makes its implementation possible even for large images. An error analysis of the RCTLS estimate, based on the mean-squared-error (MSE) criterion, is performed to verify its superiority over the constrained total least-squares (CTLS) estimate. Numerical experiments for different errors in the PSF are performed to test the RCTLS estimator. Objective and visual comparisons are presented with the linear minimum mean-squared-error (LMMSE) and the regularized least-squares (RLS) estimator. Our experiments show that the RCTLS estimator reduces significantly ringing artifacts around edges as compared to the two other approaches.