Intersections and sums of sets for the regularization of inverse problems

Inverse problems in the imaging sciences encompass a variety of applications. The primary problem of interest is the identification of physical parameters from observed data that come from experiments governed by partial-differential-equations. The secondary type of imaging problems attempts to reconstruct images and video that are corrupted by, for example, noise, subsampling, blur, or saturation. The quality of the solution of an inverse problem is sensitive to issues such as noise and missing entries in the data. The non-convex seismic full-waveform inversion problem suffers from parasitic local minima that lead to wrong solutions that may look realistic even for noiseless data. To meet some of these challenges, I propose solution strategies that constrain the model parameters at every iteration to help guide the inversion. To arrive at this goal, I present new practical workflows, algorithms, and software, that avoid manual tuning-parameters and that allow us to incorporate multiple pieces of prior knowledge. Opposed to penalty methods, I avoid balancing the influence of multiple pieces of prior knowledge by working with intersections of constraint sets. I explore and present advantages of constraints for imaging. Because the resulting problems are often non-trivial to solve, especially on large 3D grids, I introduce faster algorithms, dedicated to computing projections onto intersections of multiple sets. To connect prior knowledge more directly to problem formulations, I also combine ideas from additive models, such as cartoon-texture decomposition and robust principal component analysis, with intersections of multiple constraint sets for the regularization of inverse problems. The result is an extension of the concept of a Minkowski set. Examples from non-unique physical parameter estimation problems show that constraints in combination with projection methods provide control over the model properties at every iteration. This can lead to improved results when the constraints are carefully relaxed.