Directional Frames for Image Recovery: Multi-scale Discrete Gabor Frames

Sparsity-driven image recovery methods assume that images of interest can be sparsely approximated under some suitable system. As discontinuities of 2D images often show geometrical regularities along image edges with different orientations, an effective sparsifying system should have high orientation selectivity. There have been enduring efforts on constructing discrete frames and tight frames for improving the orientation selectivity of tensor product real-valued wavelet bases/frames. In this paper, we studied the general theory of discrete Gabor frames for finite signals, and constructed a class of discrete 2D Gabor frames with optimal orientation selectivity for sparse image approximation. Besides high orientation selectivity, the proposed multi-scale discrete 2D Gabor frames also allow us to simultaneously exploit sparsity prior of cartoon image regions in spatial domain and the sparsity prior of textural image regions in local frequency domain. Using a composite sparse image model, we showed the advantages of the proposed discrete Gabor frames over the existing wavelet frames in several image recovery experiments.