Elliptic Bellman equations with coefficients independent of the variable x are considered. Error bounds for certain types of finite-difference schemes are obtained. These estimates are sharper than the earlier results in Krylov's article of 1997.

We study a time domain decorrelation method of source signal separation from convolutive sound mixtures based on an infinite impulse response (IIR) model. The IIR model uses fewer parameters to capture the physical mixing process and is useful for finding low dimensional separating solutions. We present inversion formulas to decorrelate the mixture signals and derive filter equations involving second order time lagged statistics of mixtures. We then formulate an l constrained minimization problem and solve it by an iterative method. Numerical experiments on recorded sound mixtures show that our method is capable of sound separation in low dimensional parameter spaces with good perceptual quality and low correlation coefficient comparable to the known infomax method.

We propose to incorporate a weighted difference of anisotropic and isotropic total variation (TV) norms into a relaxed formulation of the two phase Mumford-Shah (MS) model for image segmentation. We show results exceeding those obtained by the MS model when using the standard TV norm to regularize partition boundaries. In particular, examples illustrating the qualitative differences between the proposed model and the standard MS one are shown. A fast numerical method is introduced to minimize the proposed model utilizing the difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA) and the primal dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) method.

An orthogonal discrete auditory transform (ODAT) from sound signal to spectrum is constructed by combining the auditory spreading matrix of Schroeder et. al. and the time one map of a discrete nonlocal Schrodinger equation. Thanks to the dispersive smoothing property of the Schrodinger evolution, ODAT spectrum is a smoother than that of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) consistent with human audition. ODAT and DFT are compared in signal denoising tests with spectral thresholding method. The signals are noisy speech segments. ODAT outperforms DFT in signal to noise ratio (SNR) when the noise level is relatively high.

Differential optical absorption spectroscopy (DOAS) is a powerful tool for detecting and quantifying trace gases in atmospheric chemistry\cite {Platt_Stutz08}. DOAS spectra consist of a linear combination of complex multi-peak multi-scale structures. Most DOAS analysis routines in use today are based on least squares techniques, for example, the approach developed in the 1970s uses polynomial fits to remove a slowly varying background, and known reference spectra to retrieve the identity and concentrations of reference gases. An open problem is to identify unknown gases in the fitting residuals for complex atmospheric mixtures.