DeepTV: A neural network approach for total variation minimization

Abstract: Neural network approaches have been demonstrated to work quite well to solve partial differential equations in practice. In this context approaches like physics-informed neural networks and the Deep Ritz method have become popular. In this paper, we propose a similar approach to solve an infinite-dimensional total variation minimization problem using neural networks. We illustrate that the resulting neural network problem does not have a solution in general. To circumvent this theoretic issue, we consider an auxiliary neural network problem, which indeed has a solution, and show that it converges in the sense of $\Gamma$-convergence to the original problem. For computing a numerical solution we further propose a discrete version of the auxiliary neural network problem and again show its $\Gamma$-convergence to the original infinite-dimensional problem. In particular, the $\Gamma$-convergence proof suggests a particular discretization of the total variation. Moreover, we connect the discrete neural network problem to a finite difference discretization of the infinite-dimensional total variation minimization problem. Numerical experiments are presented supporting our theoretical findings.