A stochastic continuation approach to piecewise constant reconstruction.

We address the problem of reconstructing a piecewise constant 3-D object from a few noisy 2-D line-integral projections. More generally, the theory developed here readily applies to the recovery of an ideal n-D signal (n > or =1) from indirect measurements corrupted by noise. Stabilization of this ill-conditioned inverse problem is achieved with the Potts prior model, which leads to a challenging optimization task. To overcome this difficulty, we introduce a new class of hybrid algorithms that combines simulated annealing with deterministic continuation. We call this class of algorithms stochastic continuation (SC). We first prove that, under mild assumptions, SC inherits the finite-time convergence properties of generalized simulated annealing. Then, we show that SC can be successfully applied to our reconstruction problem. In addition, we look into the concave distortion acceleration method introduced for standard simulated annealing and we derive an explicit formula for choosing the free parameter of the cost function. Numerical experiments using both synthetic data and real radiographic testing data show that SC outperforms standard simulated annealing.