# Phase shift and phase spectrum terms in multidimensional signal

I know about phase of a 1D signal. But when I go into higher dimensions like 2D,3D etc, it becomes headache to grasp the concept.

• What are the terms phase shift and phase spectrum mean in case of multidimensional(2D,3D etc.) signal like an Image or video signal?
• How is the phase term represented mathematically?
• How do we analyze phase spectrum?
• Which information do we get from phase spectrum about the signal?
• Can anybody explain with a plot or figure ?
• Check out this answer - stackoverflow.com/questions/9644708/… – Naveen Apr 16 '15 at 17:52
• That answer demonstrates that phase is important for an image. It does not speak about what exactly is phase. – Manoj Kumar Apr 17 '15 at 3:52

The translation can be decomposed into a series of component translations one along each of the axes. The axes of an image are spatial axes, and in video the third axis is temporal. The component translations have magnitudes inversely proportional to the frequencies indicated by the multidimensional index of the bin. For example, you can easily spatially translate an image in the frequency domain by adding to all phases (in a polar form representation of the bins) a function of form $af_x + bf_y$ where $a$ and $b$ are constants that give the amount of translation and $f_x$ and $f_y$ are the vertical and horizontal frequencies (bin indexes).