Adaptive Mollifiers for High Resolution Recovery of Piecewise Smooth Data from its Spectral Information

We discuss the reconstruction of piecewise smooth data from its (pseudo-) spectral information. Spectral projections enjoy superior resolution provided the data is globally smooth, while the presence of jump discontinuities is responsible for spurious O(1) Gibbs oscillations in the neighborhood of edges and an overall deterioration of the unacceptable first-order convergence in rate. The purpose is to regain the superior accuracy in the piecewise smooth case, and this is achieved by mollification. Here we utilize a modified version of the two-parameter family of spectral mollifiers introduced by Gottlieb and Tadmor [GoTa85]. The ubiquitous one-parameter, finite-order mollifiers are based on dilation. In contrast, our mollifiers achieve their high resolution by an intricate process of high-order cancellation. To this end, we first implement a localization step using an edge detection procedure [GeTa00a, b]. The accurate recovery of piecewise smooth data is then carried out in the direction of smoothness away from the edges, and adaptivity is responsible for the high resolution. The resulting adaptive mollifier greatly accelerates the convergence rate, recovering piecewise analytic data within exponential accuracy while removing the spurious oscillations that remained in [GoTa85]. Thus, these adaptive mollifiers offer a robust, general-purpose “black box” procedure for accurate post-processing of piecewise smooth data. Date received: March 29, 2001. Final version received: August 31, 2001. Communicated by Arieh Iserles. Online publication: November 16, 2001. AMS classification: 41A25, 42A10, 42C25, 65T40. OF2 E. Tadmor and J. Tanner