The effectiveness of variational methods for restoring images corrupted by Poisson noise strongly depends on the suitable selection of the regularization parameter balancing the effect of the regulation term(s) and the generalized Kullback-Liebler divergence data term. One of the approaches still commonly used today for choosing the parameter is the discrepancy principle proposed by Zanella et al. in a seminal work. It relies on imposing a value of the data term approximately equal to its expected value and works well for mid- and high-count Poisson noise corruptions. However, the series truncation approximation used in the theoretical derivation of the expected value leads to poor performance for low-count Poisson noise. In this paper, we highlight the theoretical limits of the approach and then propose a nearly exact version of it based on Monte Carlo simulation and weighted least-square fitting. Several numerical experiments are presented, proving beyond doubt that in the low-count Poisson regime, the proposed modified, nearly exact discrepancy principle performs far better than the original, approximated one by Zanella et al., whereas it works similarly or slightly better in the mid- and high-count regimes.
Keywords: Poisson noise; alternating direction method of multipliers; discrepancy principle; image restoration.