  To overcome the weakness of a total variation based model for image
restoration, various high order (typically second order) regularization models
have been proposed and studied recently. In this paper we analyze and test a
fractional-order derivative based total $\alpha$-order variation model, which
can outperform the currently popular high order regularization models. There
exist several previous works using total $\alpha$-order variations for image
restoration; however first no analysis is done yet and second all tested
formulations, differing from each other, utilize the zero Dirichlet boundary
conditions which are not realistic (while non-zero boundary conditions violate
definitions of fractional-order derivatives). This paper first reviews some
results of fractional-order derivatives and then analyzes the theoretical
properties of the proposed total $\alpha$-order variational model rigorously.
It then develops four algorithms for solving the variational problem, one based
on the variational Split-Bregman idea and three based on direct solution of the
discretise-optimization problem. Numerical experiments show that, in terms of
restoration quality and solution efficiency, the proposed model can produce
highly competitive results, for smooth images, to two established high order
models: the mean curvature and the total generalized variation.
