Critically sampled wavelets with composite dilations.

Wavelets with composite dilations provide a general framework for the construction of waveforms defined not only at various scales and locations, as traditional wavelets, but also at various orientations and with different scaling factors in each coordinate. As a result, they are useful to analyze the geometric information that often dominate multidimensional data much more efficiently than traditional wavelets. The shearlet system, for example, is a particular well-known realization of this framework, which provides optimally sparse representations of images with edges. In this paper, we further investigate the constructions derived from this approach to develop critically sampled wavelets with composite dilations for the purpose of image coding. Not only do we show that many nonredundant directional constructions recently introduced in the literature can be derived within this setting, but we also introduce new critically sampled discrete transforms that achieve much better nonlinear approximation rates than traditional discrete wavelet transforms and outperform the other critically sampled multiscale transforms recently proposed.