Ground states and singular vectors of convex variational regularization methods

Singular value decomposition is the key tool in the analysis and understanding of linear regularization methods in Hilbert spaces. Besides simplifying computations it allows to provide a good understanding of properties of the forward problem compared to the prior information introduced by the regularization methods. In the last decade nonlinear variational approaches such as 1 or total variation regularizations became quite prominent regularization techniques with certain properties being superior to standard methods. In the analysis of those, singular values and vectors did not play any role so far, for the obvious reason that these problems are nonlinear, together with the issue of defining singular values and singular vectors in the first place.