Every equi-isoclinic tight fusion frame (EITFF) is a type of optimal code in a Grassmannian, consisting of subspaces of a finite-dimensional Hilbert space for which the smallest principal angle between any pair of them is as large as possible. EITFFs yield dictionaries with minimal block coherence and so are ideal for certain types of compressed sensing. By refining classical work of Lemmens and Seidel based on Radon-Hurwitz theory, we fully characterize EITFFs in the special case where the dimension of the subspaces is exactly one-half of that of the ambient space. We moreover show that each such “Radon-Hurwitz EITFF” is highly symmetric, where every even permutation is an automorphism.

Consider the fundamental problem of arranging r-dimensional subspaces of Rdin such a way that maximizes the minimum distance between unit vectors in different subspaces. It is well known that equi-isoclinic tight fusion frames (EITFFs) are optimal for this packing problem, but such ensembles are notoriously hard to construct. In this paper, we present a novel construction of EITFFs that are totally symmetric: any permutation of the subspaces can be realized by an orthogonal transformation of ℝd.

An equiangular tight frame (ETF) yields a type of optimal packing of lines in a Euclidean space. ETFs seem to be rare, and all known infinite families of them arise from some type of combinatorial design. In this paper, we introduce a new method for constructing ETFs. We begin by showing that it is sometimes possible to construct multiple ETFs for the same space that are “mutually unbiased” in a way that is analogous to the quantum-information-theoretic concept of mutually unbiased bases. We then show that taking certain tensor products of these mutually unbiased ETFs with other ETFs sometimes yields infinite families of new complex ETFs.

An equiangular tight frame (ETF) is a set of equal norm vectors in a Euclidean space whose coherence is as small as possible, equaling the Welch bound. Also known as Welch-bound-equality sequences, such frames arise in various applications, such as waveform design, quantum information theory, compressed sensing, and algebraic coding theory. ETFs seem to be rare, and only a few methods of constructing them are known. In this paper, we present a new infinite family of complex ETFs that arises from hyperovals in finite projective planes. In particular, we give the first ever construction of a complex ETF of 76 vectors in a space of dimension 19. Recently, a computer-assisted approach was used to show that real ETFs of this size do not exist, resolving a longstanding open problem in this field. Our construction is a modification of a previously known technique for constructing ETFs from balanced incomplete block designs.

Hyperspectral data is commonly used by astronomers to discern the chemical composition of stars. Unfortunately, conventional hyperspectral platforms require long exposure times, which can hamper their use in applications like celestial navigation. We propose a compressed sensing platform that exploits the spatial sparsity of stars to quickly sample the hyperspectral data. We leverage certain combinatorial designs to devise coded apertures, and then we apply block orthogonal matching pursuit to quickly reconstruct the desired imagery.

In many areas of imaging science, it is difficult to measure the phase of linear measurements. As such, one often wishes to reconstruct a signal from intensity measurements, that is, perform phase retrieval. In this paper, we provide a novel measurement design which is inspired by interferometry and exploits certain properties of expander graphs. We also give an efficient phase retrieval procedure, and use recent results in spectral graph theory to produce a stable performance guarantee which rivals the guarantee for PhaseLift in [Candès, Strohmer, and Voroninski, PhaseLift: Exact and Stable Signal Recovery from Magnitude Measurements via Convex Programming, preprint, arXiv:1109.4499, 2011]. We use numerical simulations to illustrate the performance of our phase retrieval procedure, and we compare reconstruction error and runtime with a common alternating-projections-type procedure.

We propose a new mathematical and algorithmic framework for unsupervised image segmentation, which is a critical step in a wide variety of image processing applications. We have found that most existing segmentation methods are not successful on histopathology images, which prompted us to investigate segmentation of a broader class of images, namely those without clear edges between the regions to be segmented. We model these images as occlusions of random images, which we call textures, and show that local histograms are a useful tool for segmenting them. Based on our theoretical results, we describe a flexible segmentation framework that draws on existing work on nonnegative matrix factorization and image deconvolution. Results on synthetic texture mosaics and real histology images show the promise of the method.

An equiangular tight frame (ETF) is a set of unit vectors in a Euclidean space whose coherence is as small as possible, equaling the Welch bound. Also known as Welch-bound-equality sequences, such frames arise in various applications, such as waveform design and compressed sensing. At the moment, there are only two known flexible methods for constructing ETFs: harmonic ETFs are formed by carefully extracting rows from a discrete Fourier transform; Steiner ETFs arise from a tensor-like combination of a combinatorial design and a regular simplex. These two classes seem very different: the vectors in harmonic ETFs have constant amplitude, whereas Steiner ETFs are extremely sparse. We show that they are actually intimately connected: a large class of Steiner ETFs can be unitarily transformed into constant-amplitude frames, dubbed Kirkman ETFs. Moreover, we show that an important class of harmonic ETFs is a subset of an important class of Kirkman ETFs. This connection informs the discussion of both types of frames: some Steiner ETFs can be transformed into constant-amplitude waveforms making them more useful in waveform design; some harmonic ETFs have low spark, making them less desirable for compressed sensing. We conclude by showing that real-valued constant-amplitude ETFs are equivalent to binary codes that achieve the Grey-Rankin bound, and then construct such codes using Kirkman ETFs.

Digital fingerprinting is a framework for marking media files, such as images, music, or movies, with user-specific signatures to deter illegal distribution. Multiple users can collude to produce a forgery that can potentially overcome a fingerprinting system. This paper proposes an equiangular tight frame fingerprint design which is robust to such collusion attacks. We motivate this design by considering digital fingerprinting in terms of compressed sensing. The attack is modeled as linear averaging of multiple marked copies before adding a Gaussian noise vector. The content owner can then determine guilt by exploiting correlation between each user's fingerprint and the forged copy. The worst case error probability of this detection scheme is analyzed and bounded. Simulation results demonstrate that the average-case performance is similar to the performance of orthogonal and simplex fingerprint designs, while accommodating several times as many users.

We present a method for identifying colitis in colon biopsies as an extension of our framework for the automated identification of tissues in histology images. Histology is a critical tool in both clinical and research applications, yet even mundane histological analysis, such as the screening of colon biopsies, must be carried out by highly-trained pathologists at a high cost per hour, indicating a niche for potential automation. To this end, we build upon our previous work by extending the histopathology vocabulary (a set of features based on visual cues used by pathologists) with new features driven by the colitis application. We use the multiple-instance learning framework to allow our pixel-level classifier to learn from image-level training labels. The new system achieves accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art biological image classifiers with fewer and more intuitive features.

We show that equiangular tight frames (ETFs) are particularly well suited as additive fingerprint designs against Gaussian averaging collusion attacks when the number of users is less than the square of the signal dimension. The detector performs a binary hypothesis test in order to decide whether a user of interest is among the colluders. Given a maximum coalition size, we show that the geometric figure of merit of distance between the corresponding "guilty" and "not guilty" linear forgeries for each user is bounded away from zero. Moreover, we show that for a normalized correlation detector, reliable detection is guaranteed provided that the number of users is less than the square of the signal dimension. Moreover, we show that the coalition has the best chance of evading detection when it uses equal weights.

We study the convergence behavior of the Active Mask (AM) framework, originally designed for segmenting punctate image patterns. AM combines the flexibility of traditional active contours, the statistical modeling power of region-growing methods, and the computational efficiency of multiscale and multiresolution methods. Additionally, it achieves experimental convergence to zero-change (fixed-point) configurations, a desirable property for segmentation algorithms. At its a core lies a voting-based distributing function which behaves as a majority cellular automaton. This paper proposes an empirical measure correlated to the convergence behavior of AM, and provides sufficient theoretical conditions on the smoothing filter operator to enforce convergence.

Besides basis expansions, frames representations play a key role in signal processing. We thus consider the problem of frame domain signal processing, which is more complex and challenging than transform domain processing. Examples of such processing abound, from overlap-add/save convolution, to frequency domain LMS, and frame magnitude reconstruction. We develop a unified view of all these situations by using a common Hilbert space view of the problem, and consider algorithms in this common framework. In addition to a synthetic view of multiple signal processing methods in frames, we derive several original results. This include a direct solution to spectral modification (which usually uses an iterative algorithm) and a unicity condition for reconstruction from frame coefficient magnitudes.

We propose a new active mask algorithm for the segmentation of fluorescence microscope images of punctate patterns. It combines the (a) flexibility offered by active-contour methods, (b) speed offered by multiresolution methods, (c) smoothing offered by multiscale methods, and (d) statistical modeling offered by region-growing methods into a fast and accurate segmentation tool. The framework moves from the idea of the "contour" to that of "inside and outside," or masks, allowing for easy multidimensional segmentation. It adapts to the topology of the image through the use of multiple masks. The algorithm is almost invariant under initialization, allowing for random initialization, and uses a few easily tunable parameters. Experiments show that the active mask algorithm matches the ground truth well and outperforms the algorithm widely used in fluorescence microscopy, seeded watershed, both qualitatively, as well as quantitatively.

We propose an algorithm for automated segmentation of white matter in brain MRI images, which can be used to create connected representations of the gray matter in the cerebral cortex of the brain. These representations then provide meaningful visualizations of brain activity data obtained from fMRI studies. Our algorithm to segment the white matter from the rest of the image is based on an active-contour scheme—STACS, and thus inherits all the advantages active-contour schemes possess. The segmentation, performed in three different planes of image capture, is driven by the statistics of the image. We combine the segmentation results from the three planes by a majority voting procedure to classify each voxel in the image as white matter or not. We improve the runtime of the algorithm by rewriting the force computation as a multiscale transformation. Initial results of labeling the white matter with an accuracy of about 89% show great promise of the proposed algorithm.