Spherical framelets from spherical designs

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate in detail the structures of the variational characterization $A_{N,t}$ of the spherical $t$-design, its gradient $\nabla A_{N,t}$, and its Hessian $\mathcal{H}(A_{N,t})$ in terms of fast spherical harmonic transforms. Moreover, we propose solving the minimization problem of $A_{N,t}$ using the trust-region method to provide spherical $t$-designs with large values of $t$. Based on the obtained spherical $t$-designs, we develop (semi-discrete) spherical tight framelets as well as their truncated systems and their fast spherical framelet transforms for the practical spherical signal/image processing. Thanks to the large spherical $t$-designs and localization property of our spherical framelets, we are able to provide signal/image denoising using local thresholding techniques based on a fine-tuned spherical cap restriction. Many numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our spherical framelets, including Wendland function approximation, ETOPO data processing, and spherical image denoising.