Digital Shearlet Transforms

Over the past years, various representation systems which sparsely approximate functions governed by anisotropic features such as edges in images have been proposed. We exemplarily mention the systems of contourlets, curvelets, and shearlets. Alongside the theoretical development of these systems, algorithmic realizations of the associated transforms were provided. However, one of the most common shortcomings of these frameworks is the lack of providing a unified treatment of the continuum and digital world, i.e., allowing a digital theory to be a natural digitization of the continuum theory. In fact, shearlet systems are the only systems so far which satisfy this property, yet still deliver optimally sparse approximations of cartoon-like images. In this chapter, we provide an introduction to digital shearlet theory with a particular focus on a unified treatment of the continuum and digital realm. In our survey we will present the implementations of two shearlet transforms, one based on band-limited shearlets and the other based on compactly supported shearlets. We will moreover discuss various quantitative measures, which allow an objective comparison with other directional transforms and an objective tuning of parameters. The codes for both presented transforms as well as the framework for quantifying performance are provided in the Matlab toolbox ShearLab.