  We develop a method for sparse image reconstruction from polychromatic
computed tomography (CT) measurements under the blind scenario where the
material of the inspected object and the incident-energy spectrum are unknown.
We obtain a parsimonious measurement-model parameterization by changing the
integral variable from photon energy to mass attenuation, which allows us to
combine the variations brought by the unknown incident spectrum and mass
attenuation into a single unknown mass-attenuation spectrum function; the
resulting measurement equation has the Laplace integral form. The
mass-attenuation spectrum is then expanded into first order B-spline basis
functions. We derive a block coordinate-descent algorithm for constrained
minimization of a penalized negative log-likelihood (NLL) cost function, where
penalty terms ensure nonnegativity of the spline coefficients and nonnegativity
and sparsity of the density map. The image sparsity is imposed using
total-variation (TV) and $\ell_1$ norms, applied to the density-map image and
its discrete wavelet transform (DWT) coefficients, respectively. This algorithm
alternates between Nesterov's proximal-gradient (NPG) and limited-memory
Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno with box constraints (L-BFGS-B) steps for
updating the image and mass-attenuation spectrum parameters. To accelerate
convergence of the density-map NPG step, we apply a step-size selection scheme
that accounts for varying local Lipschitz constant of the NLL. We consider
lognormal and Poisson noise models and establish conditions for biconvexity of
the corresponding NLLs. We also prove the Kurdyka-{\L}ojasiewicz property of
the objective function, which is important for establishing local convergence
of the algorithm. Numerical experiments with simulated and real X-ray CT data
demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme.
