Regularised estimation of 2D-locally stationary wavelet processes

Locally Stationary Wavelet processes provide a flexible way of describing the time/space evolution of autocovariance structure over an ordered field such as an image/time-series. Classically, estimation of such models assume continuous smoothness of the underlying spectra and are estimated via local kernel smoothers. We propose a new model which permits spectral jumps, and suggest a regularised estimator and algorithm which can recover such structure from images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in a synthetic experiment where it shows desirable estimation properties. We conclude with an application to real images which illustrate the qualitative difference between the proposed and previous methods.