Sigsys Final Project Progress Report

Ian Hoover
May 5, 2013
My progress has been solely in the increase of my understanding of the fractional Fourier
transform. I will go through what I know.
1 Intro
We showed in class that the Fourier transform preserves the L
2
norm of functions it acts
on. This means we can think of the Fourier transform as a map from L
2
[, ] to itself.
Indeed, we even talked about the Fourier transform as a basis change (albeit, the bases
were of distributions, so perhaps our space is more accurately that of distributions on L
2
,
which is a superset of functions in L
2
, but whatever). Now, the upshot of this is that we
can compose the Fourier transform with itself. Thus we can dene F
n
{f(t)} = F
n
(u) by
F
n
{f(t)} (F F F)
. .
n
{f(t)} = F
n
(u)
The idea of the fractional Fourier transform is to generalize this notion to non-integer n.
When we do this, we want, of course, the additive property to hold. That is, we demand
that
F

= F
+
If we wanted to calculate the fractional power of a matrix, we would diagonalize it, and
then raise the eigenvalues to said fractional power. The same can be done with the Fourier
transform. Let us suppose we have a countable eigenbasis of L
2
given by
n
(t) with
associated eigenvalue
n
. Computing the fractional Fourier transform (henceforth referred
to as the FRFT) of one of these basis vectors is trivial. We have that
F

{
n
} =

n
We can essentially think of this as our denition of the FRFT, since dening a linear
transformation on the basis of a space denes the transformation on the whole space (with
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this denition, it is easy to see that our additive property holds). Now, to calculate the
FRFT of an arbitrary function f(t), we must rst express it in terms of the eigenbasis,
f =

1
A
n

n
and then apply use linearity to apply the FRFT to each term:
F

{f}(u) =

n=1
A
n

n
(u)
Now, as is we know, in the discrete case of the Fourier transform, the matrix is diagonal,
and thus its eigenvectors are orthogonal. The same is true in the continuous case.
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Thus,
we can compute the basis transformation very simply.
A
n
=
_

f(t)
n
(t)dt
Now we have
F

{f}(u) =

n=1
A
n

n
(u) (1)
=

n=1
__

f(t)
n
(t)dt
_

n
(u) (2)
=

n=1
__

f(t)

n
(t)
n
(u)dt
_
(3)
=
_

t=
f(t)
_

n=1

n
(t)
n
(u)
_
dt (4)
Then, if we dene B

(t, u) =

n=1

n
(t)
n
(u), we have expressed the FRFT as an
integral transformation:
F

{f(t)}(u) =
_

f(t)B

(t, u)dt
Thus, nding an elementary expression for the FRFT comes down to nding these functions
B

(t, u). This can be done since the eigenfunctions

n
(t) are well known. However, the
computation is not terribly fun. There is a nice way I have found to intuit almost all of
what B(t, u) needs to be though. And for this we need to do a lot of hand-waving, but
it is fun hand-waving. Hopefully I will have this on more rigorous footing for the nal
deliverable.
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The proof of this is really cool, and I will include it at some point in the nal thing. Just a bit short
on time at the moment
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2 Waving hands in a great blur
Let us think of the time-frequency plane. We can sort of think of (t t
0
) as a vertical
line in this space. At time t = t
0
, the thing goes crazy and you have every mode equally
represented. Everywhere else it is zero. On the other hand, the function e
it
is of constant
frequency component at all times and is thus represented by a horizontal line. Thus, we
can sort of think of the Fourier transform as a rotation through /2 radians of the time-
frequency plane. Now then, the FRFT is just a rotation through arbitrary angle . I
really should have gures for what comes next, and I will, but bear with me. If we rotate
a vertical line of distance u from the origin by angle (for the sake of the mental picture,
say 0 < < /2). Now, we have a line of decreasing slope. Specically, the slope of the
line is tan(/2) = cot(). Now through basic trig, we nd that the y-intercept, as it
were, is at ucsc(). Thus, we kind of have a function, which at time t = 0 has frequency
ucsc(), but the frequency decreases by cot()t. Thus we have e
(t)t
where we know
that (0) = ucsc() and that that
d
dt
= cot()t. Thus, (t) = ucsc()t cot()t
2
/2.
Well, this is great, we kind of know what happens to a delta function under the FRFT. It
seems like it gets taken to the chirp e
i(ucsc()tcot()t
2
/2)
Which should mean that this is
our desired B

(t, u). However, we know from our denition of B

(t, u) that it is symmetric

in t and u. Our current chirp function isnt. To make it so, without messing with our
conditions on w(t), we simply multiply by e
i cot()u
2
/2
and get e
i(ucsc()tcot()(t
2
+u
2
)/2)
. It
turns out, this is basically what B

(t, u) is. However, we want the FRFT to be a unitary

transformation, and for this to be so, we should calculate the normalization factor. That
is, we want to know C in
(F

{f(t)}|F

{f(t)}) = C(f|f)
where (|) is the inner product. After a lot of integral manipulation, we arrive at
_

f(t)
_

f()
_

e
i(ut csc()cot()(t
2
+u
2
)/2
e
i(u csc()cot()(
2
+u
2
)/2
duddt
The most inside works out to be 2 sin()(t ). Thus our normalization factor is

1
2 sin()
Which is almost true, except that because of the way inner product is dened, what with
multiplying a number by its complex conjugate and all, what we really have is that
C

C =
1
2 sin()
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which means C can still have any angle. I am not sure how to nd what the angle of F
aught to be, but on WIkipedia, it has it as
C =

e
i(/2)
2 sin()
Anyway, at least we nally have a denition of the FRFT:
F

{f(t)}(u) =

e
i(/2)
2 sin()
_

f(t)e
i(ut csc()cot()(t
2
+u
2
)/2)
dt
3 What to do with this beast
Now that I basically understand where the FRFT comes from, I think I want to begin
exploring how functions change as we incrementally increase , and what band-limited
means in a partially transformed signal. One notices that if we were to sample at a linearly
increasing rate, a sinusoid would appear as a chirp, so maybe the right thing to talk about
in this domain, is not sampling frequency but the rate of increase of the sampling frequency.
Anyway, I have a lot to explore still.
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