Accelerated gradient methods for the X-ray imaging of solar flares

Abstract

In this paper we present new optimization strategies for the reconstruction of X-ray images of solar flares by means of the data collected by the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI). The imaging concept of the satellite is based of rotating modulation collimator instruments, which allow the use of both Fourier imaging approaches and reconstruction techniques based on the straightforward inversion of the modulated count profiles. Although in the last decade a greater attention has been devoted to the former strategies due to their very limited computational cost, here we consider the latter model and investigate the effectiveness of different accelerated gradient methods for the solution of the corresponding constrained minimization problem. Moreover, regularization is introduced through either an early stopping of the iterative procedure, or a Tikhonov term added to the discrepancy function, by means of a discrepancy principle accounting for the Poisson nature of the noise affecting the data.