Asymptotic Convergence Rates of the Length of the Longest Run(s) in an Inflating Bernoulli Net

In image detection, one problem is to test whether the set, though mainly consisting of uniformly scattered points, also contains a small fraction of points sampled from some (a priori unknown) curve, for example, a curve with C
^α
-norm bounded by β. One approach is to analyze the data by counting membership in multiscale multianisotropic strips, which involves an algorithm that delves into the length of the path connecting many consecutive “significant” nodes. In this paper, we develop the mathematical formalism of this algorithm and analyze the statistical property of the length of the longest significant run. The rate of convergence is derived. Using percolation theory and random graph theory, we present a novel probabilistic model named, pseudo-tree model. Based on the asymptotic results for the pseudo-tree model, we further study the length of the longest significant run in an “inflating” Bernoulli net. We find that the probability parameter p of significant node plays an important role: there is a threshold p
_c
, such that in the cases of p <; p
_c
and p > p
_c
, very different asymptotic behaviors of the length of the significant runs are observed. We apply our results to the detection of an underlying curvilinear feature and prove that the test based on our proposed longest run theory is asymptotically powerful.