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Edges and surface boundaries are often the most relevant features in images and multidimensional data. It is well known that multiscale methods including wavelets and their more sophisticated multidimensional siblings offer a powerful tool for the analysis and detection of such sets. Among such methods, the continuous shearlet transform has been especially successful. This method combines anisotropic scaling and directional sensitivity controlled by shear transformations in order to precisely identify not only the location of edges and boundary points but also edge orientation and corner points. In this paper, we show that this framework can be made even more flexible by controlling the scaling parameter of the anisotropic dilation matrix and considering non-parabolic scaling. We prove that, using 'higher-than-parabolic' scaling, the modified shearlet transform is also able to estimate the degree of local flatness of an edge or surface boundary, providing more detailed information about the geometry of edge and boundary points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that the continuous shearlet transform, a novel directional multiscale transform recently introduced by the authors and their collaborators, provides a precise geometrical characterization for the boundary curves of very general planar regions. This study is motivated by imaging applications, where such boundary curves represent edges of images. The shearlet approach is able to characterize both locations and orientations of the edge points, including corner points and junctions, where the edge curves exhibit abrupt changes in tangent or curvature. Our results encompass and greatly extend previous results based on the shearlet and curvelet transforms which were limited to very special cases such as polygons and smooth boundary curves with nonvanishing curvature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: It is well known that the continuous wavelet transform has the ability to identify the set of singularities of a function or distribution f. It was recently shown that certain multidimensional generalizations of the wavelet transform are useful to capture additional information about the geometry of the singularities of f. In this paper, we consider the continuous shearlet transform, which is the mapping , where the analyzing elements form an affine system of well localized functions at continuous scales , locations , and oriented along lines of slope in the frequency domain. We show that the continuous shearlet transform allows one to exactly identify the location and orientation of the edges of planar objects. In particular, if where the functions are smooth and the sets have smooth boundaries, then one can use the asymptotic decay of , as (fine scales), to exactly characterize the location and orientation of the boundaries . This improves similar results recently obtained in the literature and provides the theoretical background for the development of improved algorithms for edge detection and analysis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In spite of their remarkable success in signal processing applications, it is now widely acknowledged that traditional wavelets are not very effective in dealing multidimensional signals containing distributed discontinuities such as edges. To overcome this limitation, one has to use basis elements with much higher directional sensitivity and of various shapes, to be able to capture the intrinsic geometrical features of multidimensional phenomena. This paper introduces a new discrete multiscale directional representation called the discrete shearlet transform. This approach, which is based on the shearlet transform, combines the power of multiscale methods with a unique ability to capture the geometry of multidimensional data and is optimally efficient in representing images containing edges. We describe two different methods of implementing the shearlet transform. The numerical experiments presented in this paper demonstrate that the discrete shearlet transform is very competitive in denoising applications both in terms of performance and computational efficiency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]