Continuous Shearlet Tight Frames

Based on the shearlet transform we present a general construction of continuous tight frames for $L^2(\mathbb{R}^2)$ from any sufficiently smooth function with anisotropic moments. This includes for example compactly supported systems, piecewise polynomial systems, or both. From our earlier results it follows that these systems enjoy the same desirable approximation properties for directional data as the previous bandlimited and very specific constructions due to Kutyniok and Labate. We also show that the representation formulas we derive are in a sense optimal for the shearlet transform

Parabolic Molecules

Anisotropic decompositions using representation systems based on parabolic scaling such as curvelets or shearlets have recently attracted significantly increased attention due to the fact that they were shown to provide optimally sparse approximations of functions exhibiting singularities on lower dimensional embedded manifolds. The literature now contains various direct proofs of this fact and of related sparse approximation results. However, it seems quite cumbersome to prove such a canon of results for each system separately, while many of the systems exhibit certain similarities. In this paper, with the introduction of the notion of {\em parabolic molecules}, we aim to provide a comprehensive framework which includes customarily employed representation systems based on parabolic scaling such as curvelets and shearlets. It is shown that pairs of parabolic molecules have the fundamental property to be almost orthogonal in a particular sense. This result is then applied to analyze parabolic molecules with respect to their ability to sparsely approximate data governed by anisotropic features. For this, the concept of {\em sparsity equivalence} is introduced which is shown to allow the identification of a large class of parabolic molecules providing the same sparse approximation results as curvelets and shearlets. Finally, as another application, smoothness spaces associated with parabolic molecules are introduced providing a general theoretical approach which even leads to novel results for, for instance, compactly supported shearlets

Definability and stability of multiscale decompositions for manifold-valued data

We discuss multiscale representations of discrete manifold-valued data. As it turns out that we cannot expect general manifold-analogues of biorthogonal wavelets to possess perfect reconstruction, we focus our attention on those constructions which are based on upscaling operators which are either interpolating or midpoint-interpolating. For definable multiscale decompositions we obtain a stability result

Refinable functions for dilation families

We consider a family of d × d matrices W e indexed by e ∈ E where (E, μ) is a probability space and some natural conditions for the family (W e ) e ∈ E are satisfied. The aim of this paper is to develop a theory of continuous, compactly supported functions $\varphi: {{\mathbb R}}^d \to {\mathbb{C}}$ which satisfy a refinement equation of the form $$\varphi (x) = \int_E \sum\limits_{\alpha \in {{\mathbb Z}}^d} a_e(\alpha)\varphi\left(W_e x - \alpha\right) d\mu(e)$$ for a family of filters $a_e : {{\mathbb Z}}^d \to {\mathbb{C}}$ also indexed by e ∈ E. One of the main results is an explicit construction of such functions for any reasonable family (W e ) e ∈ E . We apply these facts to construct scaling functions for a number of affine systems with composite dilation, most notably for shearlet system

Continuous shearlet frames and resolution of the wavefront set

In recent years directional multiscale transformations like the curvelet- or shearlet transformation have gained considerable attention. The reason for this is that these transforms are—unlike more traditional transforms like wavelets—able to efficiently handle data with features along edges. The main result in Kutyniok and Labate (Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 361:2719-2754, 2009) confirming this property for shearlets is due to Kutyniok and Labate where it is shown that for very special functions ψ with frequency support in a compact conical wegde the decay rate of the shearlet coefficients of a tempered distribution f with respect to the shearlet ψ can resolve the wavefront set of f. We demonstrate that the same result can be verified under much weaker assumptions on ψ, namely to possess sufficiently many anisotropic vanishing moments. We also show how to build frames for $${L^2(\mathbb{R}^2)}$$ from any such function. To prove our statements we develop a new approach based on an adaption of the Radon transform to the shearlet structur

Quasi-interpolation in Riemannian manifolds

We consider quasi-interpolation operators for functions assuming their values in a Riemannian manifold. We construct such operators from corresponding linear quasi-interpolation operators by replacing affine averages with the Riemannian centre of mass. As a main result, we show that the approximation rate of such a nonlinear operator is the same as for the linear operator it has been derived from. In order to formulate this result in an intrinsic way, we use the Sasaki metric to compare the derivatives of the function to be approximated with the derivatives of the nonlinear approximant. Numerical experiments confirm our theoretical finding