Image analysis using a generalised wavelet transform

In a novel form of wavelet transform (WT) the link between scale and frequency is removed, which provides a degree of shift invariance. Known as the multiresolution Fourier transform (MFT), this resembles a stack of windowed Fourier transforms (WET) in which the window size is varied systematically to give a multiresolution representation of the space-frequency plane. As such, it constitutes a superset of the WT and WFT, providing a complete representation of the frequency domain at each scale and hence enabling regions to be analysed over a range of frequencies. This has allowed the MFT to be used as the basis for tackling a wide range of problems, including linear feature and curve extraction, texture analysis and stereopsis, and hence provides a framework for a unified approach to image analysis