The Godmother of the Digital Image

[Zorro]

The mathematician Ingrid Daubechies’ pioneering work in signal processing helped make our electronic world possible — and beat a path for women in the field.

In the summer of 2010, while preparing for a long research trip to Madagascar, the mathematician Ingrid Daubechies bought a 50-inch flat-screen TV for her husband, so he could invite friends over to watch Premier League soccer games. After setting it up, the couple turned on a match, and while Daubechies’ husband, the mathematician and electrical engineer Robert Calderbank, became transfixed by the action, she got distracted. “Oh, wow!” she said. “They use wavelets!”

Wavelets are versatile mathematical tools that can be thought of as a zoom lens, making it possible to spotlight the information that matters most in an image. The telltale signs of wavelets that Daubechies spotted were on the field, pixelating at larger scales, producing a fuzzy patchwork of green. “Look here,” she exclaimed. “You can see artifacts in the grass.”

“Yes, yes,” Calderbank replied. “Who cares about the grass?” He just wanted to watch the game.

A professor at Duke University, in Durham, N.C., Daubechies’ métier is figuring out optimal ways to represent and analyze images and information. The great mathematical discovery of her early career, made in 1987 when she was 33, was the “Daubechies wavelet.” Her work, together with further wavelet developments, was instrumental to the invention of image-compression algorithms, like the JPEG2000, that pervade the digital age. “Mathematical caricature” is how Daubechies sometimes describes the way digital images strive to capture our reality with exaggerated simplifications, reducing what we see in the world to its essential features through pixel proxies and other mathematical manipulations. Wavelets can enable computers to provide greater resolution — functioning, in a sense, as human eyes naturally do, seeing more detail at the focal point and leaving the rest of the view comparatively blurry. (Daubechies, it might be worth noting, has a lazy right eye, and her left eye isn’t great, either.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/14/magazine/ingrid-daubechies.html