Directional Total Variation

Abstract

This paper introduces a “directional total variation” (TV) where the gradients are weighted depending on their direction. The introduced directional TV has increased (and tunable) sensitivity to variations at a selected direction. In order to demonstrate the utility of the directional TV, we consider an image denoising formulation. This formulation requires the realization of the “proximal map” of the directional TV. Therefore, it is relevant for more general inverse problem settings as well. We derive an algorithm that solves the problem and use the algorithm to study the effects of the parameters of the directional TV.