The random monogenic signal

The monogenic signal allows us to decompose a two-dimensional real signal into a local amplitude, a local orientation, and a local phase. In this paper, we introduce the random monogenic signal and study its second-order statistical properties. The monogenic signal may be represented as a quaternion-valued signal. We show that for homogeneous random fields, we need exactly two quaternion-valued covariance functions for a complete second-order description. We also introduce a stochastic model for unidirectional signals and a measure of unidirectionality.