Fractional and complex pseudo-splines and the construction of Parseval frames

Pseudo-splines of integer order (m, ℓ) were introduced by Daubechies, Han, Ron, and Shen as a family which allows interpolation between the classical B-splines and the Daubechies’ scaling functions. The purpose of this paper is to generalize the pseudo-splines to fractional and complex orders (z, ℓ) with α ≔ Re z ≥ 1. This allows increased flexibility in regard to smoothness: instead of working with a discrete family of functions from Cm, m∈N0, one uses a continuous family of functions belonging to the Hölder spaces Cα−1. The presence of the imaginary part of z allows for direct utilization in complex transform techniques for signal and image analyses. We also show that in analogue to the integer case, the generalized pseudo-splines lead to constructions of Parseval wavelet frames via the unitary extension principle. The regularity and approximation order of this new class of generalized splines is also discussed.