Determination of singular value truncation threshold for regularization in ill-posed problems

Appropriate regularization parameter specification is the linchpin for solving ill-posed inverse problems when regularization method is applied. This paper presents a novel technique to determine cut off singular values in the truncated singular value decomposition (TSVD) methods. Simple formulae are presented to calculate the index number of the singular value, beyond which all the smaller singular values and the corresponding vectors are truncated. The determination method of optimal truncation threshold is firstly theoretically inferred. Two-dimensional inverse problems processing Radon transform are then exemplified. Formulae to solve the problem with insufficient image resolution and projection angle number are derived by the currently proposed method. The results show that accuracy of the current method is similar to that of TSVD but with much superior efficiency. On the other hand, insufficiency in input data affects the output accuracy of the inverse solution, a least square method can be engaged to establish formulae calculating the truncation threshold. For an insufficient set of input data, the percentage difference between inversely reconstructed signal and TSVD reconstructed signal is about 3%. The current formulae offer reliable and more efficient approach to calculate the truncation threshold when TSVD is applied to solve inverse problems with known system characteristics.