An introduction to discrete finite frames

The frame concept was first introduced by Duffin and Schaeffer (1952), and it is widely used today to describe the behavior of vectors for signal representation. The Gabor (1946) expansion and wavelet transform are two special well-known cases. The goal of this article is to describe the frame theory and introduce a simple tutorial method to find discrete finite frame operators and their frame bounds. An easily implementable method for finding the discrete finite frame and subframe operators has been presented by Kaiser (1994). We introduce the method of Kaiser to compute the discrete finite frame operator. Using subframe operators, the biorthogonal basis and projection vectors in a subspace can be easily calculated. Gabor and wavelet analysis are two popular tools for signal processing, and they can reveal time-frequency distribution for a nonstationary signal. Both schemes can be regarded as signal decompositions onto a set of basis functions, and their basis functions are derived from a single prototype function through simple operations. Therefore, the basis functions used in Gabor and wavelet analysis can be regarded as special frames. For completeness we also make some simple introductions on the results of special frames such as discrete Gabor and wavelet analysis.