The Fractional Hilbert Transform and Dual-Tree Gabor-Like Wavelet Analysis

We provide an amplitude-phase representation of the dual-tree complex wavelet transform by extending the fixed quadrature relationship of the dual-tree wavelets to arbitrary phase-shifts using the fractional Hilbert transform (fHT). The fHT is a generalization of the Hilbert transform that extends the quadrature phase-shift action of the latter to arbitrary phase-shifts—a real shift parameter controls this phase-shift action. Next, based on the proposed representation and the observation that the fHT operator maps well-localized B-spline wavelets (that resemble Gaussian-windowed sinusoids) into B-spline wavelets of the same order but different shift, we relate the corresponding dual-tree scheme to the paradigm of multiresolution windowed Fourier analysis.