Backward problem for a time-space fractional diffusion equation

In this paper, a backward problem for a time-space fractional diffusion process has been considered. For this problem, we propose to construct the initial function by minimizing data residual error in Fourier space domain with variable total variation (TV) regularizing term which can protect the edges as TV regularizing term and reduce staircasing effect. The well-posedness of this optimization problem is obtained under a very general setting. Actually, we rewrite the time-space fractional diffusion equation as an abstract fractional differential equation and deduce our results by using fractional operator semigroup theory, hence, our theoretical results can be applied to other backward problems for the differential equations with more general fractional operator. Then a modified Bregman iterative algorithm has been proposed to approximate the minimizer. The new features of this algorithm is that the regularizing term altered in each step and we need not to solve the complex Euler-Lagrange equation of variable TV regularizing term (just need to solve a simple Euler-Lagrange equation). The convergence of this algorithm and the strategy of choosing parameters are also obtained. Numerical implementations are provided to support our theoretical analysis to show the flexibility of our minimization model.