A complementary $\ell^1$-TV reconstruction algorithm for limited data CT

In a variety of tomographic applications, data cannot be fully acquired, leading to a severely underdetermined image reconstruction problem. In such cases, conventional methods generate reconstructions with significant artifacts. In order to remove these artifacts, regularization methods must be applied that beneficially incorporate additional information. An important example of such methods is TV reconstruction. It is well-known that this technique can efficiently compensate for the missing data and reduce reconstruction artifacts. At the same time, however, tomographic data is also contaminated by noise, which poses an additional challenge. The use of a single penalty term (regularizer) within a variational regularization framework must therefore account for both, the missing data and the noise. However, a single regularizer may not be ideal for both tasks. For example, the TV regularizer is a poor choice for noise reduction across different scales, in which case $\ell^1$-curvelet regularization methods work well. To address this issue, in this paper we introduce a novel variational regularization framework that combines the advantages of two different regularizers. The basic idea of our framework is to perform reconstruction in two stages, where the first stage mainly aims at accurate reconstruction in the presence of noise, and the second stage aims at artifact reduction. Both reconstruction stages are connected by a data consistency condition, which makes them close to each other in the data domain. The proposed method is implemented and tested for limited view CT using a combined curvelet-TV-approach. To this end, we define and implement a curvelet transform adapted to the limited view problem and demonstrate the advantages of our approach in a series of numerical experiments in this context.