In this paper, we propose a novel iterative convolution-thresholding method (ICTM) that is applicable to a range of variational models for image segmentation. A variational model usually minimizes an energy functional consisting of a fidelity term and a regularization term. In the ICTM, the interface between two different segment domains is implicitly represented by their characteristic functions. The fidelity term is usually written as a linear functional of the characteristic functions and the regularized term is approximated by a functional of characteristic functions in terms of heat kernel convolution. This allows us to design an iterative convolution-thresholding method to minimize the approximate energy. The method is simple, efficient and enjoys the energy-decaying property. Numerical experiments show that the method is easy to implement, robust and applicable to various image segmentation models.

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In this paper, a structure-preserving algorithm is developed for the computation of a semi-stabilizing solution of a Generalized Algebraic Riccati Equation (GARE). The semi-stabilizing solution of GAREs has been used to characterize the solvability of the (J, J ′ )-spectral factorization problem in control theory for general rational matrices which may have poles and zeros on the extended imaginary axis. The main difficulty in solving such a GARE lies in the fact that its associated Hamiltonian/skew-Hamiltonian pencil has eigenvalues on the extended imaginary axis. Consequently, it is not clear which eigenspace of the associated Hamiltonian/skew-Hamiltonian pencil can characterize the desired semi-stabilizing solution. That is, it is not clear which eigenvectors and principal vectors corresponding to the eigenvalues on the extended imaginary axis should be contained in the eigenspace that we wish to compute. Hence, the well-known generalized eigenspace approach for the classical algebraic Riccati equations cannot be employed directly. The proposed algorithm consists of a structure-preserving doubling algorithm (SDA) and a postprocessing procedure to determine the desired eigenvectors and principal vectors corresponding to the purely imaginary and infinite eigenvalues. Under mild assumptions, linear convergence of rate 1/2 for the SDA is proved. Numerical experiments illustrate that the proposed algorithm performs efficiently and reliably.