Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Many important problem classes are governed by anisotropic structures such as singularities concentrated on lower dimensional embedded manifolds, for instance, edges in images or shear layers in solutions of transport dominated equations. While the ability to reliably capture and sparsely represent anisotropic features for regularization of inverse problems is obviously the more important the higher the number of spatial variables is, principal difficulties arise already in two spatial dimensions. Since it was shown that the well-known (isotropic) wavelet systems are not capable of efficiently approximating such anisotropic features, the need arose to introduce appropriate anisotropic representation systems. Among various suggestions, shearlets are the most widely used today. Main reasons for this are their optimal sparse approximation properties within a model situation in combination with their unified treatment of the continuum and digital realm, leading to faithful implementations. In this talk, we will first provide an introduction to sparse regularization of inverse problems, followed by an introduction to the anisotropic representation system of shearlets and presenting the main theoretical results. We will then analyze the effectiveness of using shearlets for sparse regularization of exemplary inverse problems such as recovery of missing data and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) both theoretically and numerically.

We consider a Gibbs distribution over random walk paths on the square lattice, proportional to a random weight of the path’s boundary. We show that in the zero temperature limit, the paths condensate around an asymptotic shape. This limit shape is characterized as the minimizer of the functional, mapping open connected subsets of the plane to the sum of their principle eigenvalue and perimeter (with respect to the first passage percolation norm). A prime novel feature of this limit shape is that it is not in the class of Wulff shapes. This is joint work with Marek Biskup.

Modern imaging data are often composed of several geometrically distinct constituents. For instance, neurobiological images could consist of a superposition of spines (pointlike objects) and dendrites (curvelike objects) of a neuron. A neurobiologist might then seek to extract both components to analyze their structure separately for the study of Alzheimer specific characteristics. However, this task seems impossible, since there are two unknowns for every datum. Compressed sensing is a novel research area, which was introduced in 2006, and since then has already become a key concept in various areas of applied mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering. It surprisingly predicts that high-dimensional signals, which allow a sparse representation by a suitable basis or, more generally, a frame, can be recovered from what was previously considered highly incomplete linear measurements, by using efficient algorithms. Utilizing the methodology of Compressed Sensing, the geometric separation problem can indeed be solved both numerically and theoretically. For the separation of point- and curvelike objects, we choose a deliberately overcomplete representation system made of wavelets (suited to pointlike structures) and shearlets (suited to curvelike structures). The decomposition principle is to minimize the $\ell_1$ norm of the representation coefficients. Our theoretical results, which are based on microlocal analysis considerations, show that at all sufficiently fine scales, nearly-perfect separation is indeed achieved. This project was done in collaboration with David Donoho (Stanford University) and Wang-Q Lim (TU Berlin).

In this talk, we will discuss recent results by Ozawa on whether every compact submanifold of S^3 can be unknotted by twistings.