Infrared Image Deblurring via High-Order Total Variation and Lp-Pseudonorm Shrinkage

The quality of infrared images is affected by various degradation factors, such as image blurring and noise pollution. Anisotropic total variation (ATV) has been shown to be a good regularization approach for image deblurring. However, there are two main drawbacks in ATV. First, the conventional ATV regularization just considers the sparsity of the first-order image gradients, thus leading to staircase artifacts. Second, it employs the L1-norm to describe the sparsity of image gradients, while the L1-norm has a limited capacity of depicting the sparsity of sparse variables. To address these limitations of ATV, a high-order total variation is introduced in the ATV deblurring model and the Lp-pseudonorm is adopted to depict the sparsity of low- and high-order total variation. In this way, the recovered image can fit the image priors with clear edges and eliminate the staircase artifacts of the ATV model. The alternating direction method of multipliers is used to solve the proposed model. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method does not only remove blurs effectively but is also highly competitive against the state-of-the-art methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively.