Analysis and detection of surface discontinuities using the 3D continuous shearlet transform (Q629262)

To over come the limitations of the traditional wavelet transform in dealing with multidimensional data, a number of methods have been introduced. While, the continuous wavelet transform [\textit{M. Holschneider}, Wavelets. An analysis tool (Oxford Mathematical Monographs) (The Clarendon Press/New York and Oxford University Press) (1995; Zbl 0874.42020); \textit{Y. Meyer}, Wavelets and operators, Cambridge Studies in Advanced Mathematics 37 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) (1992; Zbl 0776.42019)], is able to identify the location of singularities of functions and distributions through its asymptotic behavior at fine scales, but it lakes the ability to capture additional information about the geometry of the singularity set. The curvelet and shearlet transforms [\textit{E. J. Candes, D. L. Donoho}, Appl. Comput. Harmon. Anal. 19, 162--197 (2005; Zbl 1086.42022); \textit{G. Kutyniok D. Labate}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 361, 2719--2754 (2009; Zbl 1169.42012)], two of the most successful generalizations of the wavelet approach recently introduced, offer a directional multi scale framework with the ability to precisely analyze functions and distributions not only in terms of locations and scales, but also according to their directional information. However, no specific results were known so far in higher dimensions, since the arguments used in dimension \(n = 2\) do not directly carry over to the higher dimensional setting. In this paper, the authors extend this framework for the analysis of singularities to the 3-dimensional setting, and show that the 3-dimensional continuous shearlet transform precisely characterizes the boundary set of solid region in \(\mathbb R^3\) by identifying both its location and orientation.