4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING
+_
M M
H
G
x
a
b
(a)
+
+
_
M M
H
G
a
b
ˆx
(b)
Fig. 2. Laplacian pyramid. (a) One level of decomposition. The outputs are a coarse approximation a[n] and a difference b[n] between the original signal
and the prediction. (b) The new reconstruction scheme for the Laplacian pyramid [26].
to its translates with respect to the sampling lattice by M )
provides a tight frame with frame bounds are equal to 1. In this
case, we proposed the use of the optimal linear reconstruction
using the dual frame operator (or pseudo-inverse) as shown
in Figure 2(b). The new reconstruction differs from the usual
method, where the signal is obtained by simply adding back
the difference to the prediction from the coarse signal, and
was shown [26] to achieve significant improvement over the
usual reconstruction in the presence of noise.
C. Iterated directional filter banks
Bamberger and Smith [24] constructed a 2-D directional
filter bank (DFB) that can be maximally decimated while
achieving perfect reconstruction. The DFB is efficiently im-
plemented via an l-level binary tree decomposition that leads
to 2
l
subbands with wedge-shaped frequency partitioning as
shown in Figure 3(a). The original construction of the DFB in
[24] involves modulating the input image and using quincunx
filter banks with diamond-shaped filters [27]. To obtain the
desired frequency partition, a complicated tree expanding rule
has to be followed for finer directional subbands (e.g., see [28]
for details).
In [29], we proposed a new construction for the DFB that
avoids modulating the input image and has a simpler rule
for expanding the decomposition tree. Our simplified DFB
is intuitively constructed from two building blocks. The first
building block is a two-channel quincunx filter bank [27] with
fan filters (see Figure 4) that divides a 2-D spectrum into two
directions: horizontal and vertical. The second building block
of the DFB is a shearing operator, which amounts to just
reordering of image samples. Figure 5 shows an application
of a shearing operator where a −45
◦
direction edge becomes
a vertical edge. By adding a pair of shearing operator and its
inverse (“unshearing”) to before and after, respectively, a two-
channel filter bank in Figure 4, we obtain a different directional
frequency partition while maintaining perfect reconstruction.
Thus, the key in the DFB is to use an appropriate combination
of shearing operators together with two-direction partition of
quincunx filter banks at each node in a binary tree-structured
filter bank, to obtain the desired 2-D spectrum division as
shown in Figure 3(a). For details, see [29] (Chapter 3).
Using multirate identities [8], it is instructive to view an l-
level tree-structured DFB equivalently as a 2
l
parallel channel
filter bank with equivalent filters and overall sampling matrices
as shown in Figure 3(b). Denote these equivalent (directional)
synthesis filters as D
(l)
k
, 0 ≤ k < 2
l
, which correspond to the
subbands indexed as in Figure 3(a). The corresponding overall
+
x
y
0
y
1
ˆx
Q
Q
Q
Q
Fig. 4. Two-dimensional spectrum partition using quincunx filter banks with
fan filters. The black regions represent the ideal frequency supports of each
filter. Q is a quincunx sampling matrix.
(a) (b)
Fig. 5. Example of shearing operation that is used like a rotation operation
for DFB decomposition. (a) The “cameraman” image. (b) The “cameraman”
image after a shearing operation.
sampling matrices were shown [29] to have the following
diagonal forms
S
(l)
k
=
(
diag(2
l−1
, 2) for 0 ≤ k < 2
l−1
,
diag(2, 2
l−1
) for 2
l−1
≤ k < 2
l
,
(3)
which means sampling is separable. The two sets correspond
to the mostly horizontal and mostly vertical set of directions,
respectively.
From the equivalent parallel view of the DFB, we see that
the family
n
d
(l)
k
[n −S
(l)
k
m]
o
0≤k<2
l
, m∈Z
2
, (4)
obtained by translating the impulse responses of the equivalent
synthesis filters D
(l)
k
over the sampling lattices by S
(l)
k
,
provides a basis for discrete signals in l
2
(Z
2
). This basis
exhibits both directional and localization properties. Figure 6
demonstrates this fact by showing the impulse responses of
equivalent filters from an example DFB. These basis functions
have quasi-linear supports in space and span all directions. In
other words, the basis (4) resembles a local Radon transform
and are called Radonlets. Furthermore, it can be shown [29]
that if the building block filter bank in Figure 4 uses orthogonal
filters, then the resulting DFB is orthogonal and (4) becomes
an orthogonal basis.