Wavelet theory demystified

We revisit wavelet theory starting from the representation of a scaling function as the convolution of a B-spline (the regular part of it) and a distribution (the irregular or residual part). This formulation leads to some new insights on wavelets and makes it possible to rederive the main results of the classical theory - including some new extensions for fractional orders n a self-contained, accessible fashion. In particular, we prove that the B-spline component is entirely responsible for five key wavelet properties: order of approximation, reproduction of polynomials, vanishing moments, multiscale differentiation property, and smoothness (regularity) of the basis functions. We also investigate the interaction of wavelets with differential operators giving explicit time domain formulas for the fractional derivatives of the basis functions. This allows us to specify a corresponding dual wavelet basis and helps us understand why the wavelet transform provides a stable characterization of the derivatives of a signal. Additional results include a new peeling theory of smoothness, leading to the extended notion of wavelet differentiability in the L/sub p/-sense and a sharper theorem stating that smoothness implies order.     

Interpolation revisited

Based on the theory of approximation, this paper presents a unified analysis of interpolation and resampling techniques. An important issue is the choice of adequate basis functions. We show that, contrary to the common belief, those that perform best are not interpolating. By opposition to traditional interpolation, we call their use generalized interpolation; they involve a prefiltering step when correctly applied. We explain why the approximation order inherent in any basis function is important to limit interpolation artifacts. The decomposition theorem states that any basis function endowed with approximation order can be expressed as the convolution of a B-spline of the same order with another function that has none. This motivates the use of splines and spline-based functions as a tunable way to keep artifacts in check without any significant cost penalty. We discuss implementation and performance issues, and we provide experimental evidence to support our claims.     

Cardinal exponential splines: part I - theory and filtering algorithms

Causal exponentials play a fundamental role in classical system theory. Starting from those elementary building blocks, we propose a complete and self-contained signal processing formulation of exponential splines defined on a uniform grid. We specify the corresponding B-spline basis functions and investigate their reproduction properties (Green function and exponential polynomials); we also characterize their stability (Riesz bounds). We show that the exponential B-spline framework allows an exact implementation of continuous-time signal processing operators including convolution, differential operators, and modulation, by simple processing in the discrete B-spline domain. We derive efficient filtering algorithms for multiresolution signal extrapolation and approximation, extending earlier results for polynomial splines. Finally, we present a new asymptotic error formula that predicts the magnitude and the Nth-order decay of the L/sub 2/-approximation error as a function of the knot spacing T.     

Generalized sampling: a variational approach .II. Applications

For pt.I see ibid., vol.50, no.8, p.1965-76 (2000). The variational reconstruction theory from a companion paper finds a solution consistent with some linear constraints and minimizing a quadratic plausibility criterion. It is suitable for treating vector and multidimensional signals. Here, we apply the theory to a generalized sampling system consisting of a multichannel filterbank followed by a nonuniform sampling. We provide ready-made formulas, which should permit application of the technique directly to problems at hand. We comment on the practical aspects of the method, such as numerical stability and speed. We show the reconstruction formula and apply it to several practical examples, including new variational formulation of derivative sampling, landmark warping, and tomographic reconstruction     

Mathematical properties of the JPEG2000 wavelet filters

The LeGall 5/3 and Daubechies 9/7 filters have risen to special prominence because they were selected for inclusion in the JPEG2000 standard. We determine their key mathematical features: Riesz bounds, order of approximation, and regularity (Holder and Sobolev). We give approximation theoretic quantities such as the asymptotic constant for the L/sup 2/ error and the angle between the analysis and synthesis spaces which characterizes the loss of performance with respect to an orthogonal projection. We also derive new asymptotic error formulae that exhibit bound constants that are proportional to the magnitude of the first nonvanishing moment of the wavelet. The Daubechies 9/7 stands out because it is very close to orthonormal, but this turns out to be slightly detrimental to its asymptotic performance when compared to other wavelets with four vanishing moments.     

Iterated filter banks with rational rate changes connection withdiscrete wavelet transforms

Some properties of two-band filter banks with rational rate changes (“rational filter banks”) are first reviewed. Focusing then on iterated rational filter banks, compactly supported limit functions are obtained, in the same manner as previously done for dyadic schemes, allowing a characterization of such filter banks. These functions are carefully studied and the properties they share with the dyadic case are highlighted. They are experimentally observed to verify a “shift property” (strictly verified in the dyadic ease) up to an error which can be made arbitrarily small when their regularity increases. In this case, the high-pass outputs of an iterated filter bank can be very close to samples of a discrete wavelet transform with the same rational dilation factor. Straightforward extension of the formalism of multiresolution analysis is also made. Finally, it is shown that if one is ready to put up with the loss of the shift property, rational iterated filter banks can be used in the same manner as if they were dyadic filter banks, with the advantage that rational dilation factors can be chosen closer to 1     

SURE-LET multichannel image denoising: interscale orthonormal wavelet thresholding.

We propose a vector/matrix extension of our denoising algorithm initially developed for grayscale images, in order to efficiently process multichannel (e.g., color) images. This work follows our recently published SURE-LET approach where the denoising algorithm is parameterized as a linear expansion of thresholds (LET) and optimized using Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE). The proposed wavelet thresholding function is pointwise and depends on the coefficients of same location in the other channels, as well as on their parents in the coarser wavelet subband. A nonredundant, orthonormal, wavelet transform is first applied to the noisy data, followed by the (subband-dependent) vector-valued thresholding of individual multichannel wavelet coefficients which are finally brought back to the image domain by inverse wavelet transform. Extensive comparisons with the state-of-the-art multiresolution image denoising algorithms indicate that despite being nonredundant, our algorithm matches the quality of the best redundant approaches, while maintaining a high computational efficiency and a low CPU/memory consumption. An online Java demo illustrates these assertions.     

Fast interscale wavelet denoising of Poisson-corrupted images

We present a fast algorithm for image restoration in the presence of Poisson noise. Our approach is based on (1) the minimization of an unbiased estimate of the MSE for Poisson noise, (2) a linear parametrization of the denoising process and (3) the preservation of Poisson statistics across scales within the Haar DWT. The minimization of the MSE estimate is performed independently in each wavelet subband, but this is equivalent to a global image-domain MSE minimization, thanks to the orthogonality of Haar wavelets. This is an important difference with standard Poisson noise-removal methods, in particular those that rely on a non-linear preprocessing of the data to stabilize the variance.Our non-redundant interscale wavelet thresholding outperforms standard variance-stabilizing schemes, even when the latter are applied in a translation-invariant setting (cycle-spinning). It also achieves a quality similar to a state-of-the-art multiscale method that was specially developed for Poisson data. Considering that the computational complexity of our method is orders of magnitude lower, it is a very competitive alternative.The proposed approach is particularly promising in the context of low signal intensities and/or large data sets. This is illustrated experimentally with the denoising of low-count fluorescence micrographs of a biological sample.     

Using iterated rational filter banks within the ARSIS concept for producing 10m Landsat multispectral images

The ARSIS concept is designed to increase the spatial resolution of an image without modification of its spectral contents, by merging structures extracted from a higher resolution image of the same scene, but in a different spectral band. It makes use of wavelet transforms and multiresolution analysis. It is currently applied in an operational way with dyadic wavelet transforms that limit the merging of images whose ratio of their resolution is a power of 2. Nevertheless, provided some conditions rational discrete wavelet transforms can be approximated numerically by rational filter banks which would enable a more general merging. Indeed, in theory, the ratio of the resolution of the images to merge is a power of a certain family of rational numbers. The aim of this paper is to examine whether the use of those approximations of rational wavelet transforms are efficient within the ARSIS concept. This work relies on a particular case: the merging of a 10 m SPOT Panchromatic image and a 30 m Landsat Thematic Mapper multispectral image to synthesize 10 m multispectral image TM-HR.     

Isotropic polyharmonic B-splines: scaling functions and wavelets.

In this paper, we use polyharmonic B-splines to build multidimensional wavelet bases. These functions are nonseparable, multidimensional basis functions that are localized versions of radial basis functions. We show that Rabut's elementary polyharmonic B-splines do not converge to a Gaussian as the order parameter increases, as opposed to their separable B-spline counterparts. Therefore, we introduce a more isotropic localization operator that guarantees this convergence, resulting into the isotropic polyharmonic B-splines. Next, we focus on the two-dimensional quincunx subsampling scheme. This configuration is of particular interest for image processing because it yields a finer scale progression than the standard dyadic approach. However, up until now, the design of appropriate filters for the quincunx scheme has mainly been done using the McClellan transform. In our approach, we start from the scaling functions, which are the polyharmonic B-splines and, as such, explicitly known, and we derive a family of polyharmonic spline wavelets corresponding to different flavors of the semi-orthogonal wavelet transform; e.g., orthonormal, B-spline, and dual. The filters are automatically specified by the scaling relations satisfied by these functions. We prove that the isotropic polyharmonic B-spline wavelet converges to a combination of four Gabor atoms, which are well separated in the frequency domain. We also show that these wavelets are nearly isotropic and that they behave as an iterated Laplacian operator at low frequencies. We describe an efficient fast Fourier transform-based implementation of the discrete wavelet transform based on polyharmonic B-splines.