www.elsevier.com/locate/acha Wave atoms and sparsity of oscillatory patterns

We introduce “wave atoms ” as a variant of 2D wavelet packets obeying the parabolic scaling wavelength ∼ (diameter)2. We prove that warped oscillatory functions, a toy model for texture, have a significantly sparser expansion in wave atoms than in other fixed standard representations like wavelets, Gabor atoms, or curvelets. We propose a novel algorithm for a tight frame of wave atoms with redundancy two, directly in the frequency plane, by the “wrapping ” technique. We also propose variants of the basic transform for applications in image processing, including an orthonormal basis, and a shift-invariant tight frame with redundancy four. Sparsity and denoising experiments on both seismic and fingerprint images demonstrate the potential of the tool introduced