Existing image restoration methods mostly make full use of various image prior information. However, they rarely exploit the potential of residual histograms, especially their role as ensemble regularization constraint. In this paper, we propose a residual Wasserstein regularization model (RWRM), in which a residual histogram constraint is subtly embedded into a type of variational minimization problems. Specifically, utilizing the Wasserstein distance from the optimal transport theory, this

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... eme is achieved by enforcing the observed image residual histogram as close as possible to the reference residual histogram. Furthermore, the RWRM unifies the residual Wasserstein regularization and image prior regularization to improve image restoration performance. The robustness of parameter selection in the RWRM makes the proposed algorithms easier to implement. Finally, extensive experiments have confirmed that our RWRM applied to Gaussian denoising and non-blind deconvolution is effective. 2020 Mathematics Subject Classification. 68U10.