Non-decimated Quaternion Wavelet Spectral Tools with Applications

Abstract: Quaternion wavelets are redundant wavelet transforms generalizing complex-valued non-decimated wavelet transforms. In this paper we propose a matrix-formulation for non-decimated quaternion wavelet transforms and define spectral tools for use in machine learning tasks. Since quaternionic algebra is an extension of complex algebra, quaternion wavelets bring redundancy in the components that proves beneficial in wavelet based tasks. Specifically, the wavelet coefficients in the decomposition are quaternion-valued numbers that define the modulus and three phases. The novelty of this paper is definition of non-decimated quaternion wavelet spectra based on the modulus and phase-dependent statistics as low-dimensional summaries for 1-D signals or 2-D images. A structural redundancy in non-decimated wavelets and a componential redundancy in quaternion wavelets are linked to extract more informative features. In particular, we suggest an improved way of classifying signals and images based on their scaling indices in terms of spectral slopes and information contained in the three quaternionic phases. We show that performance of the proposed method significantly improves when compared to the standard versions of wavelets including the complex-valued wavelets. To illustrate performance of the proposed spectral tools we provide two examples of application on real-data problems: classification of sounds using scaling in high-frequency recordings over time and monitoring of steel rolling process using the fractality of captured digitized images. The proposed tools are compared with the counterparts based on standard wavelet transforms.