Sparse wavefield reconstruction and denoising with boostlets

Boostlets are spatiotemporal functions that decompose nondispersive wavefields into a collection of localized waveforms parametrized by dilations, hyperbolic rotations, and translations. We study the sparsity properties of boostlets and find that the resulting decompositions are significantly sparser than those of other state-of-the-art representation systems, such as wavelets and shearlets. This translates into improved denoising performance when hard-thresholding the boostlet coefficients. The results suggest that boostlets offer a natural framework for sparsely decomposing wavefields in unified space-time.

A continuous boostlet transform for acoustic waves in space-time

Sparse representation systems that encode the signal architecture have had an exceptional impact on sampling and compression paradigms. Remarkable examples are multi-scale directional systems, which, similar to our vision system, encode the underlying architecture of natural images with sparse features. Inspired by this philosophy, the present study introduces a representation system for acoustic waves in 2D space-time, referred to as the boostlet transform, which encodes sparse features of natural acoustic fields with the Poincar\'e group and isotropic dilations. Continuous boostlets, $\psi_{a,\theta,\tau}(\varsigma) = a^{-1} \psi \left(D_a^{-1} B_\theta^{-1}(\varsigma-\tau)\right) \in L^2(\mathbb{R}^2)$, are spatiotemporal functions parametrized with dilations $a > 0$, Lorentz boosts $\theta \in \mathbb{R}$, and translations $\smash{\tau \in \mathbb{R}^2}$ in space--time. The admissibility condition requires that boostlets are supported away from the acoustic radiation cone, i.e., have phase velocities other than the speed of sound, resulting in a peculiar scaling function. The continuous boostlet transform is an isometry for $L^2(\mathbb{R}^2)$, and a sparsity analysis with experimentally measured fields indicates that boostlet coefficients decay faster than wavelets, curvelets, wave atoms, and shearlets. The uncertainty principles and minimizers associated with the boostlet transform are derived and interpreted physically.