The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of recent development related to Bregman distances outside its native areas of optimization and statistics. We discuss approaches in inverse problems and image processing based on Bregman distances, whi
ch have evolved to a standard tool in these fields in the last decade. Moreover, we discuss related issues in the analysis and numerical analysis of nonlinear partial differential equations with a variational structure. For such problems Bregman distances appear to be of similar importance, but are currently used only in a quite hidden fashion. We try to work out explicitely the aspects related to Bregman distances, which also lead to novel mathematical questions and may also stimulate further research in these areas.
We propose and study two variants of the Ambrosio-Tortorelli functional where the first-order penalization of the edge variable $v$ is replaced by a second-order term depending on the Hessian or on the Laplacian of $v$, respectively. We show that bot
h the variants as above provide an elliptic approximation of the Mumford-Shah functional in the sense of $Gamma$-convergence. In particular the variant with the Laplacian penalization can be implemented without any difficulties compared to the standard Ambrosio-Tortorelli functional. The computational results indicate several advantages however. First of all, the diffuse approximation of the edge contours appears smoother and clearer for the minimizers of the second-order functional. Moreover, the convergence of alternating minimization algorithms seems improved for the new functional. We also illustrate the findings with several computational results.
