Wavelets and natural image statistics

It is well-known that wavelets provide a transformation of image data that has excellent properties with respect to image compression. The reasons for the compression ability of wavelets however have not been fully understood. In this paper we show that there is an interesting connection between wavelets and statistical properties of real-world images. This might lead to new theoretical and practical results in the domain of image processing. We show how wavelet-like filters emerge automatically as a result of applying a statistical technique, called independent component analysis, on natural images.