Hypoelliptic diffusion and human vision: a semi-discrete new twist

This paper presents a semi-discrete alternative to the theory of neurogeometry of vision, due to Citti, Petitot and Sarti. We propose a new ingredient, namely working on the group of translations and discrete rotations $SE(2,N)$. The theoretical side of our study relates the stochastic nature of the problem with the Moore group structure of $SE(2,N)$. Harmonic analysis over this group leads to very simple finite dimensional reductions. We then apply these ideas to the inpainting problem which is reduced to the integration of a completely parallelizable finite set of Mathieu-type diffusions (indexed by the dual of $SE(2,N)$ in place of the points of the Fourier plane, which is a drastic reduction). The integration of the the Mathieu equations can be performed by standard numerical methods for elliptic diffusions and leads to a very simple and efficient class of inpainting algorithms. We illustrate the performances of the method on a series of deeply corrupted images.