A novel sampling theorem on the rotation group

We develop a novel sampling theorem for functions defined on the three-dimensional rotation group SO(3) by connecting the rotation group to the three-torus through a periodic extension. Our sampling theorem requires $4L^3$ samples to capture all of the information content of a signal band-limited at $L$, reducing the number of required samples by a factor of two compared to other equiangular sampling theorems. We present fast algorithms to compute the associated Fourier transform on the rotation group, the so-called Wigner transform, which scale as $O(L^4)$, compared to the naive scaling of $O(L^6)$. For the common case of a low directional band-limit $N$, complexity is reduced to $O(N L^3)$. Our fast algorithms will be of direct use in speeding up the computation of directional wavelet transforms on the sphere. We make our SO3 code implementing these algorithms publicly available.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, minor changes to match version accepted for publication. Code available at http://www.sothree.or

Sparse image reconstruction on the sphere: analysis and synthesis

We develop techniques to solve ill-posed inverse problems on the sphere by sparse regularisation, exploiting sparsity in both axisymmetric and directional scale-discretised wavelet space. Denoising, inpainting, and deconvolution problems, and combinations thereof, are considered as examples. Inverse problems are solved in both the analysis and synthesis settings, with a number of different sampling schemes. The most effective approach is that with the most restricted solution-space, which depends on the interplay between the adopted sampling scheme, the selection of the analysis/synthesis problem, and any weighting of the l1 norm appearing in the regularisation problem. More efficient sampling schemes on the sphere improve reconstruction fidelity by restricting the solution-space and also by improving sparsity in wavelet space. We apply the technique to denoise Planck 353 GHz observations, improving the ability to extract the structure of Galactic dust emission, which is important for studying Galactic magnetism.Comment: 11 pages, 6 Figure

3D weak lensing with spin wavelets on the ball

We construct the spin flaglet transform, a wavelet transform to analyze spin signals in three dimensions. Spin flaglets can probe signal content localized simultaneously in space and frequency and, moreover, are separable so that their angular and radial properties can be controlled independently. They are particularly suited to analyzing of cosmological observations such as the weak gravitational lensing of galaxies. Such observations have a unique 3D geometrical setting since they are natively made on the sky, have spin angular symmetries, and are extended in the radial direction by additional distance or redshift information. Flaglets are constructed in the harmonic space defined by the Fourier-Laguerre transform, previously defined for scalar functions and extended here to signals with spin symmetries. Thanks to various sampling theorems, both the Fourier-Laguerre and flaglet transforms are theoretically exact when applied to bandlimited signals. In other words, in numerical computations the only loss of information is due to the finite representation of floating point numbers. We develop a 3D framework relating the weak lensing power spectrum to covariances of flaglet coefficients. We suggest that the resulting novel flaglet weak lensing estimator offers a powerful alternative to common 2D and 3D approaches to accurately capture cosmological information. While standard weak lensing analyses focus on either real or harmonic space representations (i.e., correlation functions or Fourier-Bessel power spectra, respectively), a wavelet approach inherits the advantages of both techniques, where both complicated sky coverage and uncertainties associated with the physical modeling of small scales can be handled effectively. Our codes to compute the Fourier-Laguerre and flaglet transforms are made publicly available.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, version accepted for publication in PR

On the computation of directional scale-discretized wavelet transforms on the sphere

We review scale-discretized wavelets on the sphere, which are directional and allow one to probe oriented structure in data defined on the sphere. Furthermore, scale-discretized wavelets allow in practice the exact synthesis of a signal from its wavelet coefficients. We present exact and efficient algorithms to compute the scale-discretized wavelet transform of band-limited signals on the sphere. These algorithms are implemented in the publicly available S2DW code. We release a new version of S2DW that is parallelized and contains additional code optimizations. Note that scale-discretized wavelets can be viewed as a directional generalization of needlets. Finally, we outline future improvements to the algorithms presented, which can be achieved by exploiting a new sampling theorem on the sphere developed recently by some of the authors.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of Wavelets and Sparsity XV, SPIE Optics and Photonics 2013, Code is publicly available at http://www.s2dw.org

Learning SO(3) Equivariant Representations with Spherical CNNs

We address the problem of 3D rotation equivariance in convolutional neural networks. 3D rotations have been a challenging nuisance in 3D classification tasks requiring higher capacity and extended data augmentation in order to tackle it. We model 3D data with multi-valued spherical functions and we propose a novel spherical convolutional network that implements exact convolutions on the sphere by realizing them in the spherical harmonic domain. Resulting filters have local symmetry and are localized by enforcing smooth spectra. We apply a novel pooling on the spectral domain and our operations are independent of the underlying spherical resolution throughout the network. We show that networks with much lower capacity and without requiring data augmentation can exhibit performance comparable to the state of the art in standard retrieval and classification benchmarks.Comment: Camera-ready. Accepted to ECCV'18 as oral presentatio