Cardinal Exponential Splines: Part II—Think Analog, Act Digital

By interpreting the Green-function reproduction property of exponential splines in signal processing terms, we uncover a fundamental relation that connects the impulse responses of allpole analog filters to their discrete counterparts. The link is that the latter are the B-spline coefficients of the former (which happen to be exponential splines). Motivated by this observation, we introduce an extended family of cardinal splines—the generalized E-splines—to generalize the concept for all convolution operators with rational transfer functions. We construct the corresponding compactly-supported B-spline basis functions, which are characterized by their poles and zeros, thereby establishing an interesting connection with analog filter design techniques. We investigate the properties of these new B-splines and present the corresponding signal processing calculus, which allows us to perform continuous-time operations, such as convolution, differential operators, and modulation, by simple application of the discrete version of these operators in the B-spline domain. In particular, we show how the formalism can be used to obtain exact, discrete implementations of analog filters. Finally, we apply our results to the design of hybrid signal processing systems that rely on digital filtering to compensate for the nonideal characteristics of real-world analog-to-digital (A-to-D) and D-to-A conversion systems

Sampling—50 Years After Shannon

This paper presents an account of the current state of sampling, 50 years after Shannon's formulation of the sampling theorem. The emphasis is on regular sampling where the grid is uniform. This topic has benefited from a strong research revival during the past few years, thanks in part to the mathematical connections that were made with wavelet theory. To introduce the reader to the modern, Hilbert-space formulation, we re-interpret Shannon's sampling procedure as an orthogonal projection onto the subspace of bandlimited functions. We then extend the standard sampling paradigm for a representation of functions in the more general class of "shift-invariant" functions spaces, including splines and wavelets. Practically, this allows for simpler—and possibly more realistic—interpolation models, which can be used in conjunction with a much wider class of (anti-aliasing) pre-filters that are not necessarily ideal lowpass. We summarize and discuss the results available for the determination of the approximation error and of the sampling rate when the input of the system is essentially arbitrary; e.g., non-bandlimited. We also review variations of sampling that can be understood from the same unifying perspective. These include wavelets, multi-wavelets, Papoulis generalized sampling, finite elements, and frames. Irregular sampling and radial basis functions are briefly mentioned

Structure tensor total variation

This is the final version of the article. Available from Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics via the DOI in this record.We introduce a novel generic energy functional that we employ to solve inverse imaging problems within a variational framework. The proposed regularization family, termed as structure tensor total variation (STV), penalizes the eigenvalues of the structure tensor and is suitable for both grayscale and vector-valued images. It generalizes several existing variational penalties, including the total variation seminorm and vectorial extensions of it. Meanwhile, thanks to the structure tensor’s ability to capture first-order information around a local neighborhood, the STV functionals can provide more robust measures of image variation. Further, we prove that the STV regularizers are convex while they also satisfy several invariance properties w.r.t. image transformations. These properties qualify them as ideal candidates for imaging applications. In addition, for the discrete version of the STV functionals we derive an equivalent definition that is based on the patch-based Jacobian operator, a novel linear operator which extends the Jacobian matrix. This alternative definition allow us to derive a dual problem formulation. The duality of the problem paves the way for employing robust tools from convex optimization and enables us to design an efficient and parallelizable optimization algorithm. Finally, we present extensive experiments on various inverse imaging problems, where we compare our regularizers with other competing regularization approaches. Our results are shown to be systematically superior, both quantitatively and visually

Smoothness-Increasing Accuracy-Conserving (SIAC) filtering and quasi interpolation: A unified view

Filtering plays a crucial role in postprocessing and analyzing data in scientific and engineering applications. Various application-specific filtering schemes have been proposed based on particular design criteria. In this paper, we focus on establishing the theoretical connection between quasi-interpolation and a class of kernels (based on B-splines) that are specifically designed for the postprocessing of the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method called Smoothness-Increasing Accuracy-Conserving (SIAC) filtering. SIAC filtering, as the name suggests, aims to increase the smoothness of the DG approximation while conserving the inherent accuracy of the DG solution (superconvergence). Superconvergence properties of SIAC filtering has been studied in the literature. In this paper, we present the theoretical results that establish the connection between SIAC filtering to long-standing concepts in approximation theory such as quasi-interpolation and polynomial reproduction. This connection bridges the gap between the two related disciplines and provides a decisive advancement in designing new filters and mathematical analysis of their properties. In particular, we derive a closed formulation for convolution of SIAC kernels with polynomials. We also compare and contrast cardinal spline functions as an example of filters designed for image processing applications with SIAC filters of the same order, and study their properties