An orthogonal family of quincunx wavelets with continuously adjustable order

We present a new family of two-dimensional and three-dimensional orthogonal wavelets which uses quincunx sampling. The orthogonal refinement filters have a simple analytical expression in the Fourier domain as a function of the order /spl lambda/, which may be noninteger. We can also prove that they yield wavelet bases of L/sub 2/(R/sup 2/) for any /spl lambda/>0. The wavelets are fractional in the sense that the approximation error at a given scale a decays like O(a/sup /spl lambda//); they also essentially behave like fractional derivative operators. To make our construction practical, we propose a fast Fourier transform-based implementation that turns out to be surprisingly fast. In fact, our method is almost as efficient as the standard Mallat algorithm for separable wavelets.