A fully-anisotropic Morlet wavelet to identify dominant orientations in a porous medium

Wavelet analysis can be used to extract local information from a signal or random field. We introduce a new fully-anisotropic Morlet wavelet to identify dominant orientations in anisotropic random fields. The standard Morlet wavelet is a complex-valued wavelet that has directionally-dependent real and imaginary parts but is isotropic in magnitude. Our new fully-anisotropic Morlet wavelet is anisotropic in its real and imaginary parts and also in its magnitude. We use this wavelet to identify dominant orientations in the permeability field of a 1m×1m block of Massillon sandstone. We show that this fully-anisotropic Morlet wavelet is more effective than the standard Morlet wavelet at identifying dominant orientations in two-dimensional anisotropic random fields.