A Photoacoustic Imaging Algorithm Based on Regularized Smoothed L₀ Norm Minimization

The recently emerging technique of sparse reconstruction has received much attention in the field of photoacoustic imaging (PAI). Compressed sensing (CS) has large potential in efficiently reconstructing high-quality PAI images with sparse sampling signal. In this article, we propose a CS-based error-tolerant regularized smooth L0 (ReSL0) algorithm for PAI image reconstruction, which has the same computational advantages as the SL0 algorithm while having a higher degree of immunity to inaccuracy caused by noise. In order to evaluate the performance of the ReSL0 algorithm, we reconstruct the simulated dataset obtained from three phantoms. In addition, a real experimental dataset from agar phantom is also used to verify the effectiveness of the ReSL0 algorithm. Compared to three L₀ norm, L₁ norm, and TV norm-based CS algorithms for signal recovery and image reconstruction, experiments demonstrated that the ReSL0 algorithm provides a good balance between the quality and efficiency of reconstructions. Furthermore, the PSNR of the reconstructed image calculated by the introduced method was better than the other three methods. In particular, it can notably improve reconstruction quality in the case of noisy measurement.