Advancements in Hybrid Iterative Methods for Inverse Problems

10.01.2020, 10:00-11:00  –  Campus Golm, Haus 29, Raum 0.25/0.26
SFB-Seminar

Julianne Chung

In many physical systems, measurements can only be obtained on the exterior of an object (e.g., the human body or the earth's crust), and the goal is to estimate the internal structures. In other systems, signals measured from machines (e.g., cameras) are distorted, and the aim is to recover the original input signal. These are natural examples of inverse problems that arise in fields such as medical imaging, astronomy, geophysics, and molecular biology.

Hybrid iterative methods are increasingly being used to solve large, ill-posed inverse problems, due to their desirable properties of (1) avoiding semi-convergence, whereby later reconstructions are no longer dominated by noise, and (2) enabling adaptive and automatic regularization parameter selection.  In this talk, we describe some recent advancements in hybrid iterative methods for computing solutions to large-scale inverse problems. First, we consider a hybrid approach based on the generalized Golub-Kahan bidiagonalization for computing Tikhonov regularized solutions to problems where explicit computation of the square root and inverse of the covariance kernel for the prior covariance matrix is not feasible. This is useful for large-scale problems where covariance kernels are defined on irregular grids or are only available via matrix-vector multiplication. Second, we describe flexible hybrid methods for solving $\ell_p$ regularized inverse problems, where we approximate the p-norm penalization term as a sequence of 2-norm penalization terms using adaptive regularization matrices, and we exploit flexible preconditioning techniques to efficiently incorporate the weight updates.  We introduce a flexible Golub-Kahan approach within a Krylov-Tikhonov hybrid framework, such that our approaches extend to general (non-square) l_p regularized problems. Numerical examples from dynamic photoacoustic tomography, space-time deblurring, and passive seismic tomography demonstrate the range of applicability and effectiveness of these approaches.

invited by Jana de Wiljes