We formulate as an inverse problem the construction of sparse parametric continuous curve models that fit a sequence of contour points. Our prior is incorporated as a regularization term that encourages rotation invariance and sparsity. We prove that an optimal solution to the inverse problem is a closed curve with spline components. We then show how to efficiently solve the task using B-splines as basis functions. We extend our problem formulation to curves made of two distinct components with complementary smoothness properties and solve it using hybrid splines. We illustrate the performance of our model on contours of different smoothness. Our experimental results show that we can faithfully reconstruct any general contour using few parameters, even in the presence of imprecisions in the measurements.

We propose a discretization method for continuous-domain linear inverse problems with multiple-order total-variation (TV) regularization. It is based on a recent result that proves that such inverse problems have sparse polynomial-spline solutions. Our method consists in restricting the search space to splines with knots on a uniform grid, which results in a standard convex finite-dimensional problem. As basis functions for this search space, we use the B-splines matched to the regularization order, which are optimally localized. This leads to a well-conditioned, computationally feasible optimization task. Our proposed iterative multiresolution algorithm then refines the grid size until a desired level of accuracy is met and converges to sparse solutions of our inverse problem. Finally, we present experimental results that validate our approach.

We study continuous-domain linear inverse problems with generalized total-variation (gTV) regularization, expressed in terms of a regularization operator L. It has recently been proved that such inverse problems have sparse spline solutions, with fewer jumps than the number of measurements. Moreover, the type of spline solely depends on L (L-splines) and is independent of the measurements. The continuous-domain inverse problem can be recast in an exact way as a finite-dimensional problem by restricting the search space to splines with knots on a uniform finite grid. However, expressing the L-spline coefficients in the dictionary basis of the Green's function of L is ill-suited for practical problems due to its infinite support. Instead, we propose to formulate the problem in the B-spline dictionary basis, which leads to better-conditioned problems. As we make the grid finer, we show that a solution of the continuous-domain problem can be approached arbitrarily closely with functions of this search space. This result motivates our proposed multiresolution algorithm, which computes sparse solutions of our inverse problem. We demonstrate that this algorithm is computationally feasible for 1D signals when L is an ordinary differential operator.