  We propose a method, called ACQUIRE, for the solution of constrained
optimization problems modeling the restoration of images corrupted by Poisson
noise. The objective function is the sum of a generalized Kullback-Leibler
divergence term and a TV regularizer, subject to nonnegativity and possibly
other constraints, such as flux conservation. ACQUIRE is a line-search method
that considers a smoothed version of TV, based on a Huber-like function, and
computes the search directions by minimizing quadratic approximations of the
problem, built by exploiting some second-order information. A classical
second-order Taylor approximation is used for the Kullback-Leibler term and an
iteratively reweighted norm approach for the smoothed TV term. We prove that
the sequence generated by the method has a subsequence converging to a
minimizer of the smoothed problem and any limit point is a minimizer.
Furthermore, if the problem is strictly convex, the whole sequence is
convergent. We note that convergence is achieved without requiring the exact
minimization of the quadratic subproblems; low accuracy in this minimization
can be used in practice, as shown by numerical results. Experiments on
reference test problems show that our method is competitive with
well-established methods for TV-based Poisson image restoration, in terms of
both computational efficiency and image quality.
