We propose a complex generalization of Schoenberg's cardinal splines. To this end, we go back to the Fourier domain definition of the B-splines and extend it to complex-valued degrees. We show that the resulting complex B-splines are piecewise modulated polynomials, and that they retain most of the important properties of the classical ones: smoothness, recurrence, and two-scale relations, Riesz basis generator, explicit formulae for derivatives, including fractional orders, etc. We also show that they generate multiresolution analyses of and that they can yield wavelet bases. We characterize the decay of these functions which are no-longer compactly supported when the degree is not an integer. Finally, we prove that the complex B-splines converge to modulated Gaussians as their degree increases, and that they are asymptotically optimally localized in the time–frequency plane in the sense of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
