Multiscale Optimal Filtering on the Sphere

We present a framework for the optimal filtering of spherical signals contaminated by realizations of zero-mean anisotropic noise processes. Filtering is performed in the wavelet domain given by the scale-discretized wavelet transform on the sphere. The proposed filter is optimal in the sense that it minimizes the mean square error between the filtered wavelet representation and wavelet representation of the noise-free signal. We also present a simplified formulation of the filter for the case when azimuthally symmetric wavelet functions are used. We demonstrate the use of the proposed optimal filter for denoising of an Earth topography map in the presence of uncorrelated, zero-mean, White Gaussian noise. The proposed filter is found to be superior to the hard thresholding method, particularly in the high noise regime.