Galaxy Image Restoration with Shape Constraint

Images acquired with a telescope are blurred and corrupted by noise. The blurring is usually modeled by a convolution with the Point Spread Function and the noise by Additive Gaussian Noise. Recovering the observed image is an ill-posed inverse problem. Sparse deconvolution is well known to be an efficient deconvolution technique, leading to optimized pixel Mean Square Errors, but without any guarantee that the shapes of objects (e.g. galaxy images) contained in the data will be preserved. In this paper, we introduce a new shape constraint and exhibit its properties. By combining it with a standard sparse regularization in the wavelet domain, we introduce the Shape COnstraint REstoration algorithm (SCORE), which performs a standard sparse deconvolution, while preserving galaxy shapes. We show through numerical experiments that this new approach leads to a reduction of galaxy ellipticity measurement errors by at least 44%.

Wasserstein Dictionary Learning: Optimal Transport-based unsupervised non-linear dictionary learning

This paper introduces a new nonlinear dictionary learning method for histograms in the probability simplex. The method leverages optimal transport theory, in the sense that our aim is to reconstruct histograms using so-called displacement interpolations (a.k.a. Wasserstein barycenters) between dictionary atoms; such atoms are themselves synthetic histograms in the probability simplex. Our method simultaneously estimates such atoms, and, for each datapoint, the vector of weights that can optimally reconstruct it as an optimal transport barycenter of such atoms. Our method is computationally tractable thanks to the addition of an entropic regularization to the usual optimal transportation problem, leading to an approximation scheme that is efficient, parallel and simple to differentiate. Both atoms and weights are learned using a gradient-based descent method. Gradients are obtained by automatic differentiation of the generalized Sinkhorn iterations that yield barycenters with entropic smoothing. Because of its formulation relying on Wasserstein barycenters instead of the usual matrix product between dictionary and codes, our method allows for nonlinear relationships between atoms and the reconstruction of input data. We illustrate its application in several different image processing settings.