Off-the-grid regularisation for Poisson inverse problems

Off-the-grid regularisation has been extensively employed over the last decade in the context of ill-posed inverse problems formulated in the continuous setting of the space of Radon measures $${{\mathcal {M}}(\Omega )}$$ M ( Ω ) . These approaches enjoy convexity and counteract the discretisation biases as well the numerical instabilities typical of their discrete counterparts. In the framework of sparse reconstruction of discrete point measures (sum of weighted Diracs), a Total Variation regularisation norm in $${{\mathcal {M}}(\Omega )}$$ M ( Ω ) is typically combined with an $$L^2$$ L 2 data term modelling additive Gaussian noise. To assess the framework of off-the-grid regularisation in the presence of signal-dependent Poisson noise, we consider in this work a variational model where Total Variation regularisation is coupled with a Kullback–Leibler data term under a non-negativity constraint. Analytically, we study the optimality conditions of the composite functional and analyse its dual problem. Then, we consider an homotopy strategy to select an optimal regularisation parameter and use it within a Sliding Frank-Wolfe algorithm. Several numerical experiments on both 1D/2D/3D simulated and real 3D fluorescent microscopy data are reported.