This article proposes a study of the recent
quaternionic
wavelet transform (QWT) from a practical point of view through a digital image analysis application. Based on a theoretic 2D generalization of the analytic signal leading to a strong 2D signal modeling, this representation uses actual 2D analytic
wavelets and yields subbands having a shift-invariant magnitude and a 3-angle phase, using the
quaternion algebra.
Our experiment furthers the understanding of this quite sophisticated tool, and shows its practical interest by a clear improvement of a famous wavelet application: texture classification. Thanks to coherent multiscale analysis brought by the QWT we obtain better classification results than with standard wavelets in a similar process.