WITS: Shearlets from MIA 2012

At the wonderful MIA 2012 (hey Gabriel, did i tell you how that was great?), two talks have been devoted to shearlets (Gitta Kutyniok, Gabriele Steidl), yet another geometric multiscale representation for images. And a brand new Matlab toolbox from Gabriele Steidl group named FFST (fast finite shearlet transform) and developed by Sören Haüser has been announced.

Shearlet-Zerlegung eines Auges.© Gitta Kutyniok

A good opportunity to update a little corner of WITS: Where is the Starlet, which was beginning to grow a few webs. Mmh, look like some familiar frequency domain partitioning... And now for something completely different: number 1, the shearlet... the shearlet! (Monty Python inside)




Shearlets

In short:	Non-separable wavelets built out of parabolic scaling, shear, and translation operations
Etymology:	From shear, a sheer distorsion
Origin:	Labate, Demetrio and Lim, W-Q. and Kutyniok, Gitta and Weiss Guido, Sparse multidimensional representation using shearlets (local copy) A handful lot of papers is available here: shearlet papers. A first overview is given in Shearlets. The First Five Year (Oberwolfach Report, 2010, local copy).
Some properties:	Unlike curvelets, shearlets form an affine system with a single generating mother shearlet function parameterized by a scaling, a shear, and a translation parameter. Provides the same approximation properties as curvelets, albeit with a different directional sensitivity. Exist in band-limited or compact support flavors. Possess natural, canonical smoothness spaces, called shearlet coorbit spaces, similar to Besov spaces for wavelets. Apparently extend to arbitrary any dimensions.
Usage:	Image denoising, restoration, morphological component analysis
See also:	The shearlet website, recently updated with ShearLab (... a rationally designed digital shearlet transform) For discrete implementation, there exists for instance a Digital Shearlet Transforms or Development of a Digital Shearlet Transform Based on Pseudo-Polar FFT. Shearlet Matlab toolboxes are available at ShearLab matlab toolboxes, local shearlet toolbox by G. Easley and FSST: ShearLab-1.1 (Implementation based on Cartesian Grids) (direct link) ShearLab-PPFT-1.0 (Implementation based on Pseudo-Polar Grids) (direct link) The recent (2012) FFST - Fast Finite Shearlet Transform by Sören Häuser The FFST package provides a fast implementation of the Finite Shearlet Transform. Following the the path via the continuous shearlet transform, its counterpart on cones and finally its discretization on the full grid we obtain the translation invariant discrete shearlet transform. Our discrete shearlet transform can be efficiently computed by the fast Fourier transform (FFT). The discrete shearlets constitute a Parseval frame of the finite Euclidean space such that the inversion of the shearlet transform can be simply done by applying the adjoint transform. with a Fast Finite Shearlet Transform tutorial (local copy)
Comments:	Potential a hard competitor, for years to come, to the quite oversold curvelets (IMHOlet: In My (little) Humble Opinion)

More on the topic:
2D wavelets: A panorama on multiscale geometric representations, intertwining spatial, directional and frequency selectivity