Fractional Tikhonov regularization methods have been recently proposed to reduce the oversmoothing property of the Tikhonov regularization in standard form, in order to preserve the details of the approximated solution. Their regularization and convergence properties have been previously investigated showing that they are of optimal order. This paper provides saturation and converse results on their convergence rates. Using the same iterative refinement strategy of iterated Tikhonov regularization, new iterated fractional Tikhonov regularization methods are introduced. We show that these iterated methods are of optimal order and overcome the previous saturation results. Furthermore, nonstationary iterated fractional Tikhonov regularization methods are investigated, establishing their convergence rate under general conditions on the iteration parameters. Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed regularization iterations.

The need to solve discrete ill-posed problems arises in many areas of science and engineering. Solutions of these problems, if they exist, are very sensitive to perturbations in the available data. Regularization replaces the original problem by a nearby regularized problem, whose solution is less sensitive to the error in the data. The regularized problem contains a fidelity term and a regularization term. Recently, the use of a p -norm to measure the fidelity term and a q -norm to measure the regularization term has received considerable attention. The balance between these terms is determined by a regularization parameter. In many applications, such as in image restoration, the desired solution is known to live in a convex set, such as the nonnegative orthant. It is natural to require the computed solution of the regularized problem to satisfy the same constraint(s). This paper shows that this procedure induces a regularization method and describes a modulus-based iterative method for computing a constrained approximate solution of a smoothed version of the regularized problem. Convergence of the iterative method is shown, and numerical examples that illustrate the performance of the proposed method are presented.