Demodulation by Complex-Valued Wavelets for Stochastic Pattern Recognition

Samples from stochastic signals having sufficient complexity need reveal only a little unexpected shared structure, in order to reject the hypothesis that they are independent. The mere failure of a test of statistical independence can thereby serve as a basis for recognizing stochastic patterns, provided they possess enough degrees-of-freedom, because all unrelated ones would pass such a test. This paper discusses exploitation of this statistical principle, combined with wavelet image coding methods to extract phase descriptions of incoherent patterns. Demodulation and coarse quantization of the phase information creates decision environments characterized by well-separated clusters, and this lends itself to rapid and reliable pattern recognition.