Wavelet A wavelet is a mathematical function useful in digital signal processing and image compression .

In signal processing, wavelets make it possible to recover weak signals from noise . This has proven useful especially in the processing of X-ray and magnetic-resonance images in medical applications. Images processed in this way can be "cleaned up" without blurring or muddling the details. Continuous wavelet transforms (continuous shift and scale parameters) In continuous wavelet transforms, a given signal of finite energy is projected on a continuous family of frequency bands (or similar subspaces of the Lp function space L2(R) ). For instance the signal may be represented on every frequency band of the form [f, 2f] for all positive frequencies f > 0. Then, the original signal can be reconstructed by a suitable integration over all the resulting frequency components. The frequency bands or subspaces (sub-bands) are scaled versions of a subspace at scale 1. This subspace in turn is in most situations generated by the shifts of one generating function inL2(R), the mother wavelet. For the example of the scale one frequency band [1, 2] this function is

with the (normalized) sinc function.

Discrete wavelet transforms (discrete shift and scale parameters) It is computationally impossible to analyze a signal using all wavelet coefficients, so one may wonder if it is sufficient to pick a discrete subset of the upper halfplane to be able to reconstruct a signal from the corresponding wavelet coefficients. One such system is the affine system for some real parameters a > 1, b > 0. The corresponding discrete subset of the halfplane consists of all the points (am, namb) with m, n in Z. The corresponding baby wavelets are now given as

A sufficient condition for the reconstruction of any signal x of finite energy by the formula

is that the functions

form a tight frame of L2(R).

Wavelet-Based Signal Decomposition The wavelet transform (WT) is a powerful tool in signal and image processing. It corresponds to a successive projection of a signal on a basis of functions, , formed by dilation and translation from a scaling function, (called also father wavelet), and a mother wavelet function,. The Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is a special case of the WT that provides a compact representation of a signal in time and scale. This transform decomposes the signal into mutually orthogonal set of wavelets, which is the main difference from the continuous wavelet transform or biorthogonal wavelet transform. The basic idea of DWT for one-dimensional signals is to split a signal into two parts, usually the high frequency and the low frequency part. The edge components of the signal are largely confined to the high frequencies part. In essence, the signal is passed through a series of high pass filters to analyze the high frequencies, and it is passed through a series of low pass filters to analyze the low frequencies. So, filters of different cutoff frequencies are used to analyze the signal at different resolutions.

Let us suppose that is the one-dimensional signal. The DWT of x is a multi-level decomposition, in which x is decomposed in approximation and detail coefficients at each level . The decomposition of x at scale j is made by a linear combination of the wavelet and scaling functions, as follows:

and

are called respectively the approximation and

detail coefficients, and is the standard inner product on . and are the scale and translation parameters, respectively; while is a coarsest scale of the decomposition. Using the outputs coefficients from DWT, the original signal can be reconstructed using the Inverse Discrete Wavelet Transform (IDWT). In a two dimensional setting, the DWT decomposes an image into a pyramidal structure, which is shown in Fig. 1, with various band information: low-low frequency band , low-high frequency band , high-low frequency band , high-high frequency band .

The subbands contain edge information in different directions, which will be used for the purpose of the Bayesian denoising .