  The aim of this paper is to deepen the convergence analysis of the scaled
gradient projection (SGP) method, proposed by Bonettini et al. in a recent
paper for constrained smooth optimization. The main feature of SGP is the
presence of a variable scaling matrix multiplying the gradient, which may
change at each iteration. In the last few years, an extensive numerical
experimentation showed that SGP equipped with a suitable choice of the scaling
matrix is a very effective tool for solving large scale variational problems
arising in image and signal processing. In spite of the very reliable numerical
results observed, only a weak, though very general, convergence theorem is
provided, establishing that any limit point of the sequence generated by SGP is
stationary. Here, under the only assumption that the objective function is
convex and that a solution exists, we prove that the sequence generated by SGP
converges to a minimum point, if the scaling matrices sequence satisfies a
simple and implementable condition. Moreover, assuming that the gradient of the
objective function is Lipschitz continuous, we are also able to prove the
O(1/k) convergence rate with respect to the objective function values. Finally,
we present the results of a numerical experience on some relevant image
restoration problems, showing that the proposed scaling matrix selection rule
performs well also from the computational point of view.
