What is...a Curvelet?

Energized by the success of wavelets, the last two decades saw the rapid development of a new field, computational harmonic analysis, which aims to develop new systems for effectively representing phenomena of scientific interest. The curvelet transform is a recent addition to the family of mathematical tools this community enthusiastically builds up. In short, this is a new multiscale transform with strong directional character in which elements are highly anisotropic at fine scales, with effective support shaped according to the parabolic scaling principle length^2 ~ width.