Wavelet Estimators in Nonparametric Regression: A Comparative Simulation Study

Wavelet analysis has been found to be a powerful tool for the nonparametric estimation of spatially-variable objects. We discuss in detail wavelet methods in nonparametric regression, where the data are modelled as observations of a signal contaminated with additive Gaussian noise, and provide an extensive review of the vast literature of wavelet shrinkage and wavelet thresholding estimators developed to denoise such data. These estimators arise from a wide range of classical and empirical Bayes methods treating either individual or blocks of wavelet coefficients. We compare various estimators in an extensive simulation study on a variety of sample sizes, test functions, signal-to-noise ratios and wavelet filters. Because there is no single criterion that can adequately summarise the behaviour of an estimator, we use various criteria to measure performance in finite sample situations. Insight into the performance of these estimators is obtained from graphical outputs and numerical tables. In order to provide some hints of how these estimators should be used to analyse real data sets, a detailed practical step-by-step illustration of a wavelet denoising analysis on electrical consumption is provided. Matlab codes are provided so that all figures and tables in this paper can be reproduced

Rotationally Invariant Image Representation for Viewing Direction Classification in Cryo-EM

We introduce a new rotationally invariant viewing angle classification method for identifying, among a large number of Cryo-EM projection images, similar views without prior knowledge of the molecule. Our rotationally invariant features are based on the bispectrum. Each image is denoised and compressed using steerable principal component analysis (PCA) such that rotating an image is equivalent to phase shifting the expansion coefficients. Thus we are able to extend the theory of bispectrum of 1D periodic signals to 2D images. The randomized PCA algorithm is then used to efficiently reduce the dimensionality of the bispectrum coefficients, enabling fast computation of the similarity between any pair of images. The nearest neighbors provide an initial classification of similar viewing angles. In this way, rotational alignment is only performed for images with their nearest neighbors. The initial nearest neighbor classification and alignment are further improved by a new classification method called vector diffusion maps. Our pipeline for viewing angle classification and alignment is experimentally shown to be faster and more accurate than reference-free alignment with rotationally invariant K-means clustering, MSA/MRA 2D classification, and their modern approximations

Estimation of Translation, Rotation, and Scaling between Noisy Images Using the Fourier–Mellin Transform

In this paper we focus on extended Euclidean registration of a set of noisy images. We provide an appropriate statistical model for this kind of registration problems, and a new criterion based on Fourier-type transforms is proposed to estimate the translation, rotation and scaling parameters to align a set of images. This criterion is a two step procedure which does not require the use of a reference template onto which aligning all the images. Our approach is based on M-estimation and we prove the consistency of the resulting estimators. A small scale simulation study and real examples are used to illustrate the numerical performances of our procedure

A Multiscale Approach for Statistical Characterization of Functional Images

Increasingly, scientific studies yield functional image data, in which the observed data consist of sets of curves recorded on the pixels of the image. Examples include temporal brain response intensities measured by fMRI and NMR frequency spectra measured at each pixel. This article presents a new methodology for improving the characterization of pixels in functional imaging, formulated as a spatial curve clustering problem. Our method operates on curves as a unit. It is nonparametric and involves multiple stages: (i) wavelet thresholding, aggregation, and Neyman truncation to effectively reduce dimensionality; (ii) clustering based on an extended EM algorithm; and (iii) multiscale penalized dyadic partitioning to create a spatial segmentation. We motivate the different stages with theoretical considerations and arguments, and illustrate the overall procedure on simulated and real datasets. Our method appears to offer substantial improvements over monoscale pixel-wise methods. An Appendix which gives some theoretical justifications of the methodology, computer code, documentation and dataset are available in the online supplements

Image Decomposition and Separation Using Sparse Representations: An Overview

This paper gives essential insights into the use of sparsity and morphological diversity in image decomposition and source separation by reviewing our recent work in this field. The idea to morphologically decompose a signal into its building blocks is an important problem in signal processing and has far-reaching applications in science and technology. Starck , proposed a novel decomposition method—morphological component analysis (MCA)—based on sparse representation of signals. MCA assumes that each (monochannel) signal is the linear mixture of several layers, the so-called morphological components, that are morphologically distinct, e.g., sines and bumps. The success of this method relies on two tenets: sparsity and morphological diversity. That is, each morphological component is sparsely represented in a specific transform domain, and the latter is highly inefficient in representing the other content in the mixture. Once such transforms are identified, MCA is an iterative thresholding algorithm that is capable of decoupling the signal content. Sparsity and morphological diversity have also been used as a novel and effective source of diversity for blind source separation (BSS), hence extending the MCA to multichannel data. Building on these ingredients, we will provide an overview the generalized MCA introduced by the authors in and as a fast and efficient BSS method. We will illustrate the application of these algorithms on several real examples. We conclude our tour by briefly describing our software toolboxes made available for download on the Internet for sparse signal and image decomposition and separation

A Hierarchical Bayesian Model for Frame Representation

In many signal processing problems, it may be fruitful to represent the signal under study in a frame. If a probabilistic approach is adopted, it becomes then necessary to estimate the hyper-parameters characterizing the probability distribution of the frame coefficients. This problem is difficult since in general the frame synthesis operator is not bijective. Consequently, the frame coefficients are not directly observable. This paper introduces a hierarchical Bayesian model for frame representation. The posterior distribution of the frame coefficients and model hyper-parameters is derived. Hybrid Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms are subsequently proposed to sample from this posterior distribution. The generated samples are then exploited to estimate the hyper-parameters and the frame coefficients of the target signal. Validation experiments show that the proposed algorithms provide an accurate estimation of the frame coefficients and hyper-parameters. Application to practical problems of image denoising show the impact of the resulting Bayesian estimation on the recovered signal quality

Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives

The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, covering advances in probabilistic models, auto-encoders, manifold learning, and deep networks. This motivates longer-term unanswered questions about the appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between representation learning, density estimation and manifold learning

A Universal Scheme for Wyner–Ziv Coding of Discrete Sources

We consider the Wyner–Ziv (WZ) problem of lossy compression where the decompressor observes a noisy version of the source, whose statistics are unknown. A new family of WZ coding algorithms is proposed and their universal optimality is proven. Compression consists of sliding-window processing followed by Lempel–Ziv (LZ) compression, while the decompressor is based on a modification of the discrete universal denoiser (DUDE) algorithm to take advantage of side information. The new algorithms not only universally attain the fundamental limits, but also suggest a paradigm for practical WZ coding. The effectiveness of our approach is illustrated with experiments on binary images, and English text using a low complexity algorithm motivated by our class of universally optimal WZ codes