Multiscale hierarchical decomposition methods for ill-posed problems

The multiscale hierarchical decomposition method (MHDM) was introduced in Tadmor et al (2004 Multiscale Model. Simul. 2 554-79; 2008 Commun. Math. Sci. 6 281-307) as an iterative method for total variation (TV) regularization, with the aim of recovering details at various scales from images corrupted by additive or multiplicative noise. Given its success beyond image restoration, we extend the MHDM iterates in order to solve larger classes of linear ill-posed problems in Banach spaces. Thus, we define the MHDM for more general convex or even nonconvex penalties, and provide convergence results for the data fidelity term. We also propose a flexible version of the method using adaptive convex functionals for regularization, and show an interesting multiscale decomposition of the data. This decomposition result is highlighted for the Bregman iteration method that can be expressed as an adaptive MHDM. Furthermore, we state necessary and sufficient conditions when the MHDM iteration agrees with the variational Tikhonov regularization, which is the case, for instance, for one-dimensional TV denoising. Finally, we investigate several particular instances and perform numerical experiments that point out the robust behavior of the MHDM.