Difference of Anisotropic and Isotropic TV for Segmentation under Blur and Poisson Noise

In this paper, we aim to segment an image degraded by blur and Poisson noise. We adopt a smoothing-and-thresholding (SaT) segmentation framework that finds a piecewise-smooth solution, followed by $k$-means clustering to segment the image. Specifically for the image smoothing step, we replace the least-squares fidelity for Gaussian noise in the Mumford-Shah model with a maximum posterior (MAP) term to deal with Poisson noise and we incorporate the weighted difference of anisotropic and isotropic total variation (AITV) as a regularization to promote the sparsity of image gradients. For such a nonconvex model, we develop a specific splitting scheme and utilize a proximal operator to apply the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Convergence analysis is provided to validate the efficacy of the ADMM scheme. Numerical experiments on various segmentation scenarios (grayscale/color and multiphase) showcase that our proposed method outperforms a number of segmentation methods, including the original SaT.