Fast Computation of Polyharmonic B-Spline Autocorrelation Filters

A fast computational method is given for the Fourier transform of the polyharmonic B-spline autocorrelation sequence in d dimensions. The approximation error is exponentially decaying with the number of terms taken into account. The algorithm improves speed upon a simple truncated-sum approach. Moreover, it is virtually independent of the spline's order. The autocorrelation filter directly serves for various tasks related to polyharmonic splines, such as interpolation, orthonormalization, and wavelet basis design

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

The Pairing of a Wavelet Basis With a Mildly Redundant Analysis via Subband Regression

A distinction is usually made between wavelet bases and wavelet frames. The former are associated with a one-to-one representation of signals, which is somewhat constrained but most efficient computationally. The latter are over-complete, but they offer advantages in terms of flexibility (shape of the basis functions) and shift-invariance. In this paper, we propose a framework for improved wavelet analysis based on an appropriate pairing of a wavelet basis with a mildly redundant version of itself (frame). The processing is accomplished in four steps: 1) redundant wavelet analysis, 2) wavelet-domain processing, 3) projection of the results onto the wavelet basis, and 4) reconstruction of the signal from its nonredundant wavelet expansion. The wavelet analysis is pyramid-like and is obtained by simple modification of Mallat's filterbank algorithm (e.g., suppression of the down-sampling in the wavelet channels only). The key component of the method is the subband regression filter (Step 3) which computes a wavelet expansion that is maximally consistent in the least squares sense with the redundant wavelet analysis. We demonstrate that this approach significantly improves the performance of soft-threshold wavelet denoising with a moderate increase in computational cost. We also show that the analysis filters in the proposed framework can be adjusted for improved feature detection; in particular, a new quincunx Mexican-hat-like wavelet transform that is fully reversible and essentially behaves the (gamma/2)th Laplacian of a Gaussian

Polyharmonic Smoothing Splines and the Multidimensional Wiener Filtering of Fractal-Like Signals

Motivated by the fractal-like behavior of natural images, we develop a smoothing technique that uses a regularization functional which is a fractional iterate of the Laplacian. This type of functional was initially introduced by Duchon for the approximation of nonuniformily sampled, multidimensional data. He proved that the general solution is a smoothing spline that is represented by a linear combination of radial basis functions (RBFs). Unfortunately, this is tedious to implement for images because of the poor conditioning of RBFs and their lack of decay. Here, we present a much more efficient method for the special case of a uniform grid. The key idea is to express Duchon's solution in a fractional polyharmonic B-spline basis that spans the same space as the RBFs. This allows us to derive an algorithm where the smoothing is performed by filtering in the Fourier domain. Next we prove that the above smoothing spline can be optimally tuned to provide the MMSE estimation of a fractional Brownian field corrupted by white noise. This is a strong result that not only yields the best linear filter (Wiener solution), but also the optimal interpolation space, which is not bandlimited. It also suggests a way of using the noisy data to identify the optimal parameters (order of the spline and smoothing strength), which yields a fully automatic smoothing procedure. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm by comparing it against an oracle Wiener filter, which requires the knowledge of the true noiseless power spectrum of the signal. We find that our approach performs almost as well as the oracle solution over a wide range of conditions

Self-Similar Vector Fields

We propose statistically self-similar and rotation-invariant models for vector fields, study some of the more significant properties of these models, and suggest algorithms and methods for reconstructing vector fields from numerical observations, using the same notions of self-similarity and invariance that give rise to our stochastic models. We illustrate the efficacy of the proposed schemes by applying them to the problems of denoising synthetic flow phantoms and enhancing flow-sensitive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of blood flow in the aorta. In constructing our models and devising our applied schemes and algorithms, we rely on two fundamental notions. The first of these, referred to as "innovation modelling" in the thesis, is the principle —applicable both analytically and synthetically— of reducing complex phenomena to combinations of simple independent components or "innovations". The second fundamental idea is that of "invariance", which indicates that in the absence of any distinguishing factor, two equally valid models or solutions should be given equal consideration

Advanced Geoscience Remote Sensing

Nowadays, advanced remote sensing technology plays tremendous roles to build a quantitative and comprehensive understanding of how the Earth system operates. The advanced remote sensing technology is also used widely to monitor and survey the natural disasters and man-made pollution. Besides, telecommunication is considered as precise advanced remote sensing technology tool. Indeed precise usages of remote sensing and telecommunication without a comprehensive understanding of mathematics and physics. This book has three parts (i) microwave remote sensing applications, (ii) nuclear, geophysics and telecommunication; and (iii) environment remote sensing investigations

A Panorama on Multiscale Geometric Representations, Intertwining Spatial, Directional and Frequency Selectivity

The richness of natural images makes the quest for optimal representations in image processing and computer vision challenging. The latter observation has not prevented the design of image representations, which trade off between efficiency and complexity, while achieving accurate rendering of smooth regions as well as reproducing faithful contours and textures. The most recent ones, proposed in the past decade, share an hybrid heritage highlighting the multiscale and oriented nature of edges and patterns in images. This paper presents a panorama of the aforementioned literature on decompositions in multiscale, multi-orientation bases or dictionaries. They typically exhibit redundancy to improve sparsity in the transformed domain and sometimes its invariance with respect to simple geometric deformations (translation, rotation). Oriented multiscale dictionaries extend traditional wavelet processing and may offer rotation invariance. Highly redundant dictionaries require specific algorithms to simplify the search for an efficient (sparse) representation. We also discuss the extension of multiscale geometric decompositions to non-Euclidean domains such as the sphere or arbitrary meshed surfaces. The etymology of panorama suggests an overview, based on a choice of partially overlapping "pictures". We hope that this paper will contribute to the appreciation and apprehension of a stream of current research directions in image understanding.Comment: 65 pages, 33 figures, 303 reference