Does anyone know why they don't use more modern directional representation systems, like curvelets, or shearlets?
My understanding is that they provide optimally sparse representation of this type of data - data that's smooth except on these wavefront sets, and that wavelets perform comparatively poorly.
Maybe a huge amount of legacy code using wavelets that's been debugged and experimentally validated. CFD code checking is laborious and errors often very subtle, and so tends to be pretty conservative.
My understanding is that they provide optimally sparse representation of this type of data - data that's smooth except on these wavefront sets, and that wavelets perform comparatively poorly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shearlet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curvelet