A frame is a sequence of vectors in a Hilbert space satisfying certain inequalities that
make it valuable for signal processing and other purposes. There is a formula giving
the reconstruction of a signal (a vector in the space) from its sequence of inner
products (the Fourier coefficients) with the elements of the frame sequence. A
-frame, or
operator-valued frame, is a sequence of operators defined on a countable ordered
index set that has properties analogous to those of a frame sequence.
We present a new approach to the matter of defining a Hilbert space frame,
indexed by an ordered set, when the set is a measure space which is not necessarily
purely atomic. Continuous frames have been widely studied in the literature, but the
measure spaces they are associated with are not necessarily ordered in any way. Our
approach is to make the measure space a directed set, and then replace the sequence
of vectors (or operators) with a net indexed by the directed set, obtaining a natural
generalization of the usual notion of generalized frame. We show that this definition
makes sense mathematically, and proceed to obtain generalizations of several of
the standard results for frame and Bessel sequences, and also Riesz bases,
-frames
and operator-valued frames.