ABSTRACT
Many of the ideas behind wavelet transforms have been in existence for a long time. However, wavelet transform analysis as we now know it really began in the mid1980s, when it was developed to interrogate seismic signals. Interest in wavelet analysis remained within a small, mainly mathematical community during the rest of the 1980s, with only a handful of scientific papers coming out each year. The application of wavelet transform analysis in science and engineering really began to take off at the beginning of the 1990s, with a rapid growth in the numbers of researchers turning their attention to wavelet analysis during that decade. There are now thousands of refereed journal papers concerning the wavelet transform, and these cover all numerate disciplines. The wavelet transform is a mathematical tool which is now an indispensible part of many data analysts’ toolboxes. This book aims to provide the reader with both an introduction to the theory of wavelet transforms and a wide-ranging overview of their use in practice. The two remaining sections of this short introductory chapter contain, respectively, a brief non-mathematical description of the wavelet transform and a guide to subsequent chapters of the book.
