Riesz transform associated with the fractional Fourier transform and applications in image edge detection

Abstract

The fractional Hilbert transform was introduced by Zayed [30, Zayed, 1998] and has been widely used in signal processing. In view of its connection with the fractional Fourier transform, Chen, the first, second and fourth authors of this paper in [6, Chen et al., 2021] studied the fractional Hilbert transform and other fractional multiplier operators on the real line. The present paper is concerned with a natural extension of the fractional Hilbert transform to higher dimensions: this extension is the fractional Riesz transform and is given by multiplication which a suitable chirp function on the fractional Fourier transform side. In addition to a thorough study of the fractional Riesz transform, in this work we also investigate the boundedness of singular integral operators with chirp functions on rotation invariant spaces, chirp Hardy spaces and their relation to chirp BMO spaces, as well as applications of the theory of fractional multipliers in partial differential equations. Through numerical simulation, we provide physical and geometric interpretations of high-dimensional fractional multipliers. Finally, we present an application of the fractional Riesz transforms in edge detection which verifies a hypothesis insinuated in [26, Xu et al., 2016]. In fact our numerical implementation confirms that amplitude, phase, and direction information can be simultaneously extracted by controlling the order of the fractional Riesz transform.