Polarization spectrogram of bivariate signals

Abstract

Bivariate signals are commonly processed with the usual Fourier transform, using methods such as the rotary spectrum analysis. We show that bivariate signals can be efficiently processed using the Quaternion Fourier transform. A bivariate counterpart of the analytic signal is introduced, the quaternion embedding of a complex signal. It leads to identify natural parameters describing polarization properties, amplitude and phase of the signal. The properties of the quaternion short-term Fourier transform are studied and the polarization spectrogram is introduced. A synthetic example illustrates the relevance of the proposed approach.