The discrete approach of the wavelet transform can be done with the special version of the so-called à trous algorithm (with holes) [,]. One assumes that the sampled data are the scalar products at pixels k of the function with a scaling function which corresponds to a low pass filter.
The first filtering is then performed by a twice magnified scale leading to the set. The signal difference contains the information between these two scales and is the discrete set associated with the wavelet transform corresponding to . The associated wavelet is therefore .
The distance between samples increasing by a factor 2 from the scale ( i > 0 ) to the next one, is given by:
and the discrete wavelet transform by:
The coefficients derive from the scaling function :
The algorithm allowing one to rebuild the data frame is evident: the last smoothed array is added to all the differences .
If we choose the linear interpolation for the scaling function (see figure ):
we have:
is obtained by:
and is obtained from by:
The figure shows the wavelet associated to the scaling function.
The wavelet coefficients at the scale j are:
The above à trous algorithm is easily extensible to the two dimensional space. This leads to a convolution with a mask of pixels for the wavelet connected to linear interpolation. The coefficents of the mask are:
At each scale j, we obtain a set (we will call it wavelet plane in the following), which has the same number of pixels as the image.
If we choose a -spline for the scaling function, the coefficients of the convolution mask in one dimension are (), and in two dimensions: