In the realm of signal and image denoising and reconstruction,
regularization techniques have generated a great deal of attention with a multitude of variants. A key component for their success is that under certain assumptions, the solution of minimum
norm is a good approximation to the solution of minimum
norm. In this work, we demonstrate that this approximation can
... [Show full abstract] result in artifacts that are inconsistent with desired sparsity promoting properties, resulting in subpar results in {some} instances. With this as our motivation, we develop a multiscale higher order total variation (MHOTV) approach, which we show is closely related to the use of multiscale Daubechies wavelets. In the development of MHOTV, we confront a number of computational issues, and show how they can be circumvented in a mathematically elegant way, via operator decomposition and alternatively converting the problem into Fourier space. The relationship with wavelets, which we believe has generally gone unrecognized, is shown to hold in several numerical results, although subtle improvements in the results can be seen due to the properties of MHOTV.