In this paper we propose a new approach for constructing efficient schemes for nonsmooth convex optimization. It is based on a special smoothing technique, which can be applied to the functions with explicit max-structure. Our approach can be considered as an alternative to black-box minimization

(Article begins on next page) The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation Mumford, David Bryant, and Jayant Shah. 1989. Optimal approximations by piecewise smooth functions and associated variational problems

We attempt to recover a function of unknown smoothness from noisy, sampled data. We introduce a procedure, SureShrink, which suppresses noise by thresholding the empirical wavelet coefficients. The thresholding is adaptive: a threshold level is assigned to each dyadic resolution level

We present an extensive empirical comparison of several smoothing techniques in the domain of language modeling, including those described by Jelinek and Mercer (1980), Katz (1987), and Church and Gale (1991). We investigate for the first time how factors such as training data size, corpus (e

We use polyharmonic Radial Basis Functions (RBFs) to reconstruct smooth, manifold surfaces from point-cloud data and to repair incomplete meshes. An object's surface is defined implicitly as the zero set of an RBF fitted to the given surface data. Fast methods for fitting and evaluating RBFs

balls in each of two broad scales of smoothness classes. These two properties are unprecedented in several ways. Our proof of these results develops new facts about abstract statistical inference and its connection with an optimal recovery model.

data sets are described Facilities are provided for several types of statistical analyses of multiple D functional data sets The programs are written in ANSI C and Motif to run on Unix workstations

In the last few years, several new algorithms based on graph cuts have been developed to solve energy minimization problems in computer vision. Each of these techniques constructs a graph such that the minimum cut on the graph also minimizes the energy. Yet, because these graph constructions

We study an energy functional for computing optical flow that combines three assumptions: a brightness constancy assumption, a gradient constancy assumption, and a discontinuity-preserving spatio-temporal smoothness constraint.

. With this principle we derive a single operator shape which is optimal at any scale. The optimal detector has a simple approximate implementation in which edges are marked at maxima in gradient magnitude of a Gaussian-smoothed image. We extend this simple detector using operators of several widths to cope