  The problem of restoration of digital images from their degraded measurements
plays a central role in a multitude of practically important applications. A
particularly challenging instance of this problem occurs in the case when the
degradation phenomenon is modeled by an ill-conditioned operator. In such a
case, the presence of noise makes it impossible to recover a valuable
approximation of the image of interest without using some a priori information
about its properties. Such a priori information is essential for image
restoration, rendering it stable and robust to noise. Particularly, if the
original image is known to be a piecewise smooth function, one of the standard
priors used in this case is defined by the Rudin-Osher-Fatemi model, which
results in total variation (TV) based image restoration. The current arsenal of
algorithms for TV-based image restoration is vast. In the present paper, a
different approach to the solution of the problem is proposed based on the
method of iterative shrinkage (aka iterated thresholding). In the proposed
method, the TV-based image restoration is performed through a recursive
application of two simple procedures, viz. linear filtering and soft
thresholding. Therefore, the method can be identified as belonging to the group
of first-order algorithms which are efficient in dealing with images of
relatively large sizes. Another valuable feature of the proposed method
consists in its working directly with the TV functional, rather then with its
smoothed versions. Moreover, the method provides a single solution for both
isotropic and anisotropic definitions of the TV functional, thereby
establishing a useful connection between the two formulae.
