The Sparsity of Cycle Spinning for Wavelet-Based Solutions of Linear Inverse Problems

The usual explanation of the efficacy of wavelet-based methods hinges on the sparsity of many real-world objects in the wavelet domain. Yet, standard wavelet-shrinkage techniques for sparse reconstruction are not competitive in practice, one reason being that the lack of shift-invariance of the wavelet transform produces blocky artifacts. The standard remedy is cycle spinning, which results in a substantial reduction of these artifacts. In this letter, we propose a theoretical investigation of the sparsity of solutions to the cycle-spinning variant of wavelet-based resolutions of linear inverse problems. We derive a representer theorem that provides a complete characterization of the solution set. Our theorem indicates that the solutions are typically not sparse, where sparsity is measured with respect to the wavelet dictionary. This exposes that the role of sparsity in the success of wavelet-based solutions of linear inverse problems requires further investigation. We corroborate our theoretical results with numerical examples for the problem of image denoising.