Characterization and analysis of edges in piecewise smooth functions (Q285536)

The analysis and detection of edges is a central problem in applied mathematics and image processing. In the paper under review, the authors consider a very realistic model of images with edges that is not limited to characteristic functions of sets, but includes general smooth density functions. The geometric analysis and detection of edges in this situation is significantly more challenging and cannot be handled using the techniques and arguments developed in the previous studies. They show that the continuous shearlet transform can detect the location and orientation of edge points, including corner points, through its asymptotic decay at fine scales. The new results set the theoretical groundwork for the application of the shearlet framework to a wider class of problems from image processing.