Hypercomplex Wavelets
From MMVLWiki
Introduction
Complex wavelets are superior to real-valued wavelets because they are nearly shift-invariant. Complex wavelets yield amplitude-phase information in a similar way as the Fourier transform does. In contrast to the Fourier transform, wavelets allow to analyse the signal locally and thus can be applied to signals with a non-stationary statistic (such as images of a natural scene). In the same way as a one-dimensional signal requires complex numbers to represent the local structure of the signal, two-dimensional signals require hypercomplex numbers.