On a new singular and degenerate extension of the p-Laplace operator

• We study a novel degenerate and singular elliptic operator Δ˜(τ,χ) defined by Δ˜(τ,χ)u=τ(x,Du)(|Du|Δ1u+χ(x,Du)Δ∞u), where the singular weights τ(x,s)>0 and χ(x,s)≥0 are continuous functions on Ω×Rn∖{0}. The operator Δ˜(τ,χ) is an extension of Δ(p,q)u=|Du|qΔ1u+(p−1)|Du|p−2Δ∞u,p≥1,q≥0, introduced by the authors in Baravdishet al. (2020), which in turn is an extension of the p-Laplace operator Δp. We establish the well-posedness of the Neumann boundary value problem for the parabolic equation ut=Δ˜(τ,χ)u in the framework of viscosity solutions. For the solution u, the weight χ controls the evolution along the tangential and the normal directions, respectively, on the level surface of u. The weight τ controls the total speed of the evolution of u. We also prove the consistency and the convergence of the numerical scheme for the finite differences method of the parabolic equation above. Numerical simulations show that our novel nonlinear operator Δ˜(τ,χ) gives better results than both the Perona–Malik (Perona and Malik, 1990) and total variation (TV) methods (Chan and Shen, 2005) when applied to image enhancement.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Matematik -- Matematisk analys (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Mathematics -- Mathematical Analysis (hsv//eng)

Keyword

p-Laplace operator

Degenerate singular elliptic operator

Parabolic equations

Viscosity solutions

Image denoising

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)