Adapting overcomplete wavelet models to natural images
Phil A. Sallee, Bruno A. Olshausen · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2003
Overcomplete wavelet representations have become increasingly popular for their ability to provide highly sparse and robust descriptions of natural signals. We describe a method for incorporating an overcomplete wavelet representation as part of a statistical model of images which includes a sparse prior distribution over the wavelet coefficients. The wavelet basis functions are parameterized by a small set of 2-D functions. These functions are adapted to maximize the average log-likelihood of the model for a large database of natural images. When adapted to natural images, these functions become selective to different spatial orientations, and they achieve a superior degree of sparsity on natural images as compared with traditional wavelet bases. The learned basis is similar to the Steerable Pyramid basis, and yields slightly higher SNR for the same number of active coefficients. Inference with the learned model is demonstrated for applications such as denoising, with results that compare favorably with other methods.