Coorbit Theory of Warped Time-Frequency Systems in $${\mathbb {R}}^d$$

Abstract Warped time-frequency systems have recently been introduced as a class of structured continuous frames for functions on the real line. Herein, we generalize this framework to the setting of functions of arbitrary dimensionality. After showing that the basic properties of warped time-frequency representations carry over to higher dimensions, we determine conditions on the warping function which guarantee that the associated Gramian is well-localized, so that associated families of coorbit spaces can be constructed. We then show that discrete Banach frame decompositions for these coorbit spaces can be obtained by sampling the continuous warped time-frequency systems. In particular, this implies that sparsity of a given function f in the discrete warped time-frequency dictionary is equivalent to membership of f in the coorbit space. We put special emphasis on the case of radial warping functions, for which the relevant assumptions simplify considerably.