📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

We investigate an open problem arising in iterative image reconstruction. In its general form, the problem is to determine the stability of the parametric family of operators $P(t) = W (I-t B)$ and $R(t) = I-W + (I+tB)^{-1} (2W-I)$, where $W$ is a stochastic matrix and $B$ is a nonzero, nonnegative matrix. We prove that if $W$ is primitive, then there exists $T > 0$ such that the spectral radii $\varrho(P(t))$ and $\varrho(R(t))$ are strictly less than $1$ for all $0 < t < T$. The proof combines standard perturbation theory for eigenvalues and an observation about the analyticity of the spectral radius. This argument, however, does not provide an estimate of $T$. To this end, we compute $T$ explicitly for specific classes of $W$ and $B$. Building on these partial results and supporting numerical evidence, we conjecture that if $B$ is positive semidefinite and satisfies certain technical conditions, then $\varrho(P(t)), \, \varrho(R(t))<1$ for all $0 < t < 2/\varrho(B)$. As an application, we show how these results can be applied to establish the convergence of certain iterative imaging algorithms.