Summary: A convex variational framework is proposed for solving inverse problems in Hilbert spaces with a priori information on the representation of the target solution in a frame. The objective function to be minimized consists of a separable term penalizing each frame coefficient individually, and a smooth term modelling the data formation model as well as other constraints. Sparsity-constrained and Bayesian formulations are examined as special cases. A splitting algorithm is presented to solve this problem and its convergence is established in infinite-dimensional spaces under mild conditions on the penalization functions, which need not be differentiable. Numerical simulations demonstrate applications to frame-based image restoration.