Enhancement of coupled multichannel images using sparsity constraints.

We consider the problem of joint enhancement of multichannel images with pixel based constraints on the multichannel data. Previous work by Cetin and Karl introduced nonquadratic regularization methods for SAR image enhancement using sparsity enforcing penalty terms. We formulate an optimization problem that jointly enhances complex-valued multichannel images while preserving the cross-channel information, which we include as constraints tying the multichannel images together. We pose this problem as a joint optimization problem with constraints. We first reformulate it as an equivalent (unconstrained) dual problem and develop a numerically-efficient method for solving it. We develop the Dual Descent method, which has low complexity, for solving the joint optimization problem. The algorithm is applied to both an interferometric synthetic aperture radar (IFSAR) problem, in which the relative phase between two complex-valued images indicate height, and to a synthetic multimodal medical image example.