Recent research in inverse problems seeks to develop a mathematically coherent foundation for combining data-driven models, and in particular those based on deep learning, with domain-specific knowledge contained in physical–analytical models. The focus is on solving ill-posed inverse problems that are at the core of many challenging applications in the natural sciences, medicine and life sciences, as well as in engineering and industrial applications. This survey paper aims to give an account of some of the main contributions in data-driven inverse problems.

The present paper studies so-called deep image prior (DIP) techniques in the context of ill-posed inverse problems. DIP networks have been recently introduced for applications in image processing; also first experimental results for applying DIP to inverse problems have been reported. This paper aims at discussing different interpretations of DIP and to obtain analytic results for specific network designs and linear operators. The main contribution is to introduce the idea of viewing these approaches as the optimization of Tikhonov functionals rather than optimizing networks. Besides theoretical results, we present numerical verifications.