Inverse problems with second-order Total Generalized Variation constraints

Abstract: Total Generalized Variation (TGV) has recently been introduced as penalty functional for modelling images with edges as well as smooth variations. It can be interpreted as a "sparse" penalization of optimal balancing from the first up to the $k$-th distributional derivative and leads to desirable results when applied to image denoising, i.e., $L^2$-fitting with TGV penalty. The present paper studies TGV of second order in the context of solving ill-posed linear inverse problems. Existence and stability for solutions of Tikhonov-functional minimization with respect to the data is shown and applied to the problem of recovering an image from blurred and noisy data.