A full-rank matrix A ∈ IR n×m with n < m generates an underdetermined system of linear equations Ax = b having infinitely many solutions. Suppose we seek the sparsest solution, i.e., the one with the fewest nonzero entries: can it ever be unique? If so, when? As optimization of sparsity is combinatorial in nature, are there efficient methods for finding the sparsest solution? These questions have been answered positively and constructively in recent years, exposing a wide variety of surprising phenomena; in particular, the existence of easily-verifiable conditions under which optimally-sparse solutions can be found by concrete, effective computational methods. Such theoretical results inspire a bold perspective on some important practical problems in signal and image processing. Several well-known signal and image processing problems can be cast as demanding solutions of undetermined systems of equations. Such problems have previously seemed, to many, intractable. There is considerable evidence that these problems often have sparse solutions. Hence, advances in finding sparse solutions to underdetermined systems energizes research on such signal and image processing problems – to striking effect. In this paper we review the theoretical results on sparse solutions of linear systems, empirical

Abstract—A novel adaptive and patch-based approach is proposed for image denoising and representation. The method is based on a pointwise selection of small image patches of fixed size in the variable neighborhood of each pixel. Our contribution is to associate with each pixel the weighted sum of data points within an adaptive neighborhood, in a manner that it balances the accuracy of approximation and the stochastic error, at each spatial position. This method is general and can be applied under the assumption that there exists repetitive patterns in a local neighborhood of a point. By introducing spatial adaptivity, we extend the work earlier described by Buades et al. which can be considered as an extension of bilateral filtering to image patches. Finally, we propose a nearly parameter-free algorithm for image denoising. The method is applied to both artificially corrupted (white Gaussian noise) and real images and the performance is very close to, and in some cases even surpasses, that of the already published denoising methods. I.

Abstract. Recent advances in applied mathematics and signal processing have shown that, in order to obtain sparse representations of multi-dimensional functions and signals, one has to use representation elements distributed not only at various scales and locations – as in classical wavelet theory – but also at various directions. In this paper, we show that we obtain a construction having exactly these properties by using the framework of affine systems. The representation elements that we obtain are generated by translations, dilations, and shear transformations of a single mother function, and are called shearlets. The shearlets provide optimally sparse representations for 2-D functions that are smooth away from discontinuities along curves. Another benefit of this approach is that, thanks to their mathematical structure, these systems provide a Multiresolution analysis similar to the one associated with classical wavelets, which is very useful for the development of fast algorithmic implementations.

Inherent to photograph-like images are two types of structures: large smooth regions and geometrically smooth edge contours separating those regions. Over the past years, efficient representations and algorithms have been developed that take advantage of each of these types of structure independently: quadtree models for 2D wavelets are well-suited for uniformly smooth images (C 2 everywhere), while quadtree-organized wedgelet approximations are appropriate for purely geometrical images (containing nothing but C 2 contours). This paper shows how to combine the wavelet and wedgelet representations in order to take advantage of both types of structure simultaneously. We show that the asymptotic approximation and rate-distortion performance of a wavelet-wedgelet representation on piecewise smooth images mirrors the performance of both wavelets (for uniformly smooth images) and wedgelets (for purely geometrical images). We also discuss an efficient algorithm for fitting the wavelet-wedgelet representation to an image; the convenient quadtree structure of the combined representation enables new algorithms such as the recent WSFQ geometric image coder. 1.

In this paper we study the nonsubsampled contourlet transform. We address the corresponding filter design problem using the McClellan transformation. We show how zeroes can be imposed in the filters so that the iterated structure produces regular basis functions. The proposed design framework yields filters that can be implemented efficiently through a lifting factorization. We apply the constructed transform in image noise removal where the results obtained are comparable to the state-of-the art, being superior in some cases.

Abstract—In spite of the success of the standard wavelet transform (WT) in image processing in recent years, the efficiency of its representation is limited by the spatial isotropy of its basis functions built in the horizontal and vertical directions. One-dimensional (1-D) discontinuities in images (edges and contours) that are very important elements in visual perception, intersect too many wavelet basis functions and lead to a nonsparse representation. To efficiently capture these anisotropic geometrical structures characterized by many more than the horizontal and vertical directions, a more complex multidirectional (M-DIR) and anisotropic transform is required. We present a new lattice-based perfect reconstruction and critically sampled anisotropic M-DIR WT. The transform retains the separable filtering and subsampling and the simplicity of computations and filter design from the standard two-dimensional WT, unlike in the case of some other directional transform constructions (e.g., curvelets, contourlets, or edgelets). The corresponding anisotropic basis unctions (directionlets) have directional vanishing moments along any two directions with rational slopes. Furthermore, we show that this novel transform provides an efficient tool for nonlinear approximation of images, achieving the approximation power ( 1 55), which, while slower than the optimal rate ( 2), is much better than ( 1) achieved with wavelets, but at similar complexity. Index Terms—Directional vanishing moments, directionlets, filter banks, geometry, multidirection, multiresolution, separable filtering, sparse image representation, wavelets. I.

We introduce “wave atoms ” as a variant of 2D wavelet packets obeying the parabolic scaling wavelength ∼ (diameter) 2. We prove that warped oscillatory functions, a toy model for texture, have a significantly sparser expansion in wave atoms than in other fixed standard representations like wavelets, Gabor atoms, or curvelets. We propose a novel algorithm for a tight frame of wave atoms with redundancy two, directly in the frequency plane, by the “wrapping ” technique. We also propose variants of the basic transform for applications in image processing, including an orthonormal basis, and a shift-invariant tight frame with redundancy four. Sparsity and denoising experiments on both seismic and fingerprint images demonstrate the potential of the tool introduced.

This paper proposes a new method for image compression. The method is based on the approximation of an image, regarded as a function, by a linear spline over an adapted triangulation, D(Y ), which is the Delaunay triangulation of a small set Y of significant pixels. The linear spline minimizes the distance to the image, measured by the mean square error, among all linear splines over D(Y ). The significant pixels in Y are selected by an adaptive thinning algorithm, which recursively removes less significant pixels in a greedy way, using a sophisticated criterion for measuring the significance of a pixel. The proposed compression method combines the approximation scheme with a customized scattered data coding scheme. We demonstrate that our compression method outperforms JPEG2000 on two geometric images and performs competitively with JPEG2000 on three popular test cases of real images.

It is now widely acknowledged that traditional wavelets are not very effective in dealing with multidimensional signals containing distributed discontinuities. To achieve a more efficient representation one has to use basis elements with much higher directional sensitivity. This paper introduces a new discrete multiscale directional representation called the Discrete Shearlet Transform. This approach, which is based on the shearlet transform, combines the power of multiscale methods with a unique ability to capture the geometry of multidimensional data and is optimally efficient in representing images containing edges. We describe two different methods of implementing the shearlet transform. The numerical experiments presented in this paper demonstrate that the Discrete Shearlet Transform is very competitive in denoising applications both in terms of performance and computational efficiency.

filter bank (DFB) for an efficient directional decomposition of 2-D signals. Due to the nonseparable nature of the system, extending the DFB to higher dimensions while still retaining its attractive features is a challenging and previously unsolved problem. We propose a new family of filter banks, named NDFB, that can achieve the directional decomposition of arbitrary-dimensional ( 2) signals with a simple and efficient tree-structured construction. In 3-D, the ideal passbands of the proposed NDFB are rectangular-based pyramids radiating out from the origin at different orientations and tiling the entire frequency space. The proposed NDFB achieves perfect reconstruction via an iterated filter bank with a redundancy factor of in-D. The angular resolution of the proposed NDFB can be iteratively refined by invoking more levels of decomposition through a simple expansion rule. By combining the NDFB with a new multiscale pyramid, we propose the surfacelet transform, which can be used to efficiently capture and represent surface-like singularities in multidimensional data. Index Terms—Directional decomposition, directional filter banks (DFBs), filter design, high-dimensional transforms, surfacelets. I.