Random tree besov priors – towards fractal imaging

Abstract

We propose alternatives to Bayesian prior distributions that are frequently used in the study of inverse problems. Our aim is to construct priors that have similar good edge-preserving properties as total variation or Mumford-Shah priors but correspond to well-defined infinite-dimensional random variables, and can be approximated by finite-dimensional random vari-ables. We introduce a new wavelet-based model, where the non-zero coefficients are chosen in a systematic way so that prior draws have certain fractal behaviour. We show that realisations of this new prior take values in Besov spaces and have singularities only on a small set τ with a certain Hausdorff dimension. We also introduce an efficient algorithm for calculating the MAP estimator, arising from the the new prior, in the denoising problem.