  Composite convex optimization models arise in several applications, and are
especially prevalent in inverse problems with a sparsity inducing norm and in
general convex optimization with simple constraints. The most widely used
algorithms for convex composite models are accelerated first order methods,
however they can take a large number of iterations to compute an acceptable
solution for large-scale problems. In this paper we propose to speed up first
order methods by taking advantage of the structure present in many applications
and in image processing in particular. Our method is based on multi-level
optimization methods and exploits the fact that many applications that give
rise to large scale models can be modelled using varying degrees of fidelity.
We use Nesterov's acceleration techniques together with the multi-level
approach to achieve $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{\epsilon})$ convergence rate, where
$\epsilon$ denotes the desired accuracy. The proposed method has a better
convergence rate than any other existing multi-level method for convex
problems, and in addition has the same rate as accelerated methods, which is
known to be optimal for first-order methods. Moreover, as our numerical
experiments show, on large-scale face recognition problems our algorithm is
several times faster than the state of the art.
