Phase-Aware Wavelet-Based-Scattering Encoder-Decoder for Dense Predictions

Abstract

Scattering transforms achieve Lipschitz stability and translation invariance, but dense prediction tasks require preserving spatial structure lost in global averaging. We propose Phase-Aware Scattering Encoder-Decoder, which restores this information by explicitly preserving phase in skip connections. On image denoising (BSD68), breaking translation invariance improves PSNR by $+2.17$~dB; phase preservation adds $+1.03$~dB. A novel spatial shuffling ablation ($-1.26$~dB penalty) demonstrates phase encodes location-dependent structure. We conduct a preliminary extensibility study on a second dense prediction task (ISIC skin lesion segmentation), with full cross-validation as ongoing work. This work advances principled wavelet-deep learning integration, showing how phase information complements scattering's stability-expressiveness trade-off in pixel-level prediction.