In this paper, we propose a novel symmetric alternating minimization algorithm to solve a broad class of total variation (TV) regularization problems. Unlike the usual $z^k\to x^k$ Gauss-Seidel cycle, the proposed algorithm performs the special $\overline{x}^{k}\to z^k\to x^k$ cycle. The main idea for our setting is the recent symmetric Gauss-Seidel (sGS) technique which is developed for solving the multi-block convex composite problem. This idea also enables us to build the equivalence between the proposed method and the well-known accelerated proximal gradient (APG) method. The faster convergence rate of the proposed algorithm can be directly obtained from the APG framework and numerical results including image denoising, image deblurring, and analysis sparse recovery problem demonstrate the effectiveness of the new algorithm.