  In many signal processing problems, it may be fruitful to represent the
signal under study in a frame. If a probabilistic approach is adopted, it
becomes then necessary to estimate the hyper-parameters characterizing the
probability distribution of the frame coefficients. This problem is difficult
since in general the frame synthesis operator is not bijective. Consequently,
the frame coefficients are not directly observable. This paper introduces a
hierarchical Bayesian model for frame representation. The posterior
distribution of the frame coefficients and model hyper-parameters is derived.
Hybrid Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms are subsequently proposed to sample
from this posterior distribution. The generated samples are then exploited to
estimate the hyper-parameters and the frame coefficients of the target signal.
Validation experiments show that the proposed algorithms provide an accurate
estimation of the frame coefficients and hyper-parameters. Application to
practical problems of image denoising show the impact of the resulting Bayesian
estimation on the recovered signal quality.
