Blind image deblurring with a difference of the mixed anisotropic and mixed isotropic total variation regularization

•The Le-2e nonconvex regularization is proposed to approximate the sparse prior of natural images.•A new restoration model for solving clear images is constructed.•An efficient algorithm is designed to optimize the proposed model.•The presented method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on synthetic datasets and real-world images. This paper proposes a simple model for image deblurring with a new total variation regularization. Classically, the L1-21 regularizer represents a difference of anisotropic (i.e. L1) and isotropic (i.e. L21) total variation, so we define a new regularization as Le-2e, which is the weighted difference of the mixed anisotropic (i.e. L0 + L1 = Le) and mixed isotropic (i.e. L0 + L21 = L2e), and it is characterized by sparsity-promotingand robustness in image deblurring. Then, we merge the L0-gradient into the model for edge-preserving and detail-removing. The union of the Le-2e regularization and L0-gradient improves the performance of image deblurring and yields high-quality blur kernel estimates. Finally, we design a new solution format that alternately iterates the difference of convex algorithm, the split Bregman method, and the approach of half-quadratic splitting to optimize the proposed model. Experimental results on quantitative datasets and real-world images show that the proposed method can obtain results comparable to state-of-the-art works.