The development of the quaternion wavelet transform

•Review of quaternion wavelets and transforms.•Overview of real and complex wavelets.•Discusses quaternion short-time Fourier transforms.•Discusses “true” quaternion wavelets and transforms.•Comprehensive list of references.

The purpose of this article is to review what has been written on what other authors have called quaternion wavelet transforms (QWTs): there is no consensus about what these should look like and what their properties should be. We briefly explain what real continuous and discrete wavelet transforms and multiresolution analysis are and why complex wavelet transforms were introduced; we then go on to detail published approaches to QWTs and to analyse them. We conclude with our own analysis of what it is that should define a QWT as being truly quaternionic and why all but a few of the “QWTs” we have described do not fit our definition.