SHAH: SHape-Adaptive Haar wavelets for image processing

We propose the SHAH (SHape-Adaptive Haar) transform for images, which results in an orthonormal, adaptive decomposition of the image into Haar-wavelet-like components, arranged hierarchically according to decreasing importance, whose shapes reflect the features present in the image. The decomposition is as sparse as it can be for piecewise-constant images. It is performed via an stepwise bottom-up algorithm with quadratic computational complexity; however, nearly-linear variants also exist. SHAH is rapidly invertible. We show how to use SHAH for image denoising. Having performed the SHAH transform, the coefficients are hard- or soft-thresholded, and the inverse transform taken. The SHAH image denoising algorithm compares favourably to the state of the art for piecewise-constant images. A clear asset of the methodology is its very general scope: it can be used with any images or more generally with any data that can be represented as graphs or networks.