This paper is a follow-up of the work [Chen, J.-S.: J. Optimiz. Theory Appl., Submitted for publication (2004)] where an NCP-function and a descent method were proposed for the nonlinear complementarity problem. An unconstrained reformulation was formulated due to a merit function based on the proposed NCP-function. We continue to explore properties of the merit function in this paper. In particular, we show that the gradient of the merit function is globally Lipschitz continuous which is important from computational aspect. Moreover, we show that the merit function is <i>SC</i> ¹ function which means it is continuously differentiable and its gradient is semismooth. On the other hand, we provide an alternative proof, which uses the new properties of the merit function, for the convergence result of the descent method considered in [Chen, J.-S.: J. Optimiz. Theory Appl., Submitted for publication (2004)].

We consider image deblurring problem in the presence of impulsive noise. It is known that \emph{total variation} (TV) regularization with L1-norm penalized data fitting (TVL1 for short) works reasonably well only when the level of impulsive noise is relatively low. For high level impulsive noise, TVL1 works poorly. The reason is that all data, both corrupted and noise free, are equally penalized in data fitting, leading to insurmountable difficulty in balancing regularization and data fitting. In this paper, we propose to combine TV regularization with nonconvex \emph{smoothly clipped absolute deviation} (SCAD) penalty for data fitting (TVSCAD for short). Our motivation is simply that data fitting should be enforced only when an observed data is not severely corrupted, while for those data more likely to be severely corrupted, less or even null penalization should be enforced. A \emph{difference of convex functions} algorithm is adopted to solve the nonconvex TVSCAD model, resulting in solving a sequence of TVL1-equivalent problems, each of which can then be solved efficiently by the alternating direction method of multipliers. Theoretically, we establish global convergence to a critical point of the nonconvex objective function. The R-linear and at-least-sublinear convergence rate results are derived for the cases of anisotropic and isotropic TV, respectively. Numerically, experimental results are given to show that the TVSCAD approach improves those of the TVL1 significantly, especially for cases with high level impulsive noise, and is comparable with the recently proposed iteratively corrected TVL1 method [\textit{Inverse Problems}, 32 (2016), pp.~085004].

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The surveys in the field of nonlinear filtering (NLF) are enumerous. Most of them are application-oriented and served as the tutorials for the practioners. The local approaches, including Kalman filter and its invariants, have already been studied from various point of views, due to its off-the-shelf implementation and wide applications. However, it cannot give good estimation of the states in highly nonlinear system or with non-Gaussian initial conditional density functions. Moreover, while the local methods only approximate the mean and variance, the global ones seek the way to directly obtain the conditional density function of the states. Consequently, all the statistical information is acquired. In this survey, we shall briefly go through the local approaches and put emphases on the existing three major global approaches: finite-dimensional NLF, sequential Monte Carlo methods (particle filter) and the {Yau-Yau's} on- and off-line solver of Duncan-Mortensen-Zakai's equation {\cite{YY_08}}. The discussions are mainly from the mathematical point of view.