Wavelets: getting perspective

When a person becomes so involved in details that they begin to lose sight of the big picture, it is said "they can't see the forest for the trees!" The wavelet transform is a relatively new signal processing tool that allows us to efficiently analyze the small details and the big picture. Wavelets have been shown to be very useful for signal compression, denoising and pattern recognition. This should not be surprising since they provide an efficient method for analyzing nonstationary signals at varying frequencies. With wavelets, we can analyze low frequencies (the forest) at very fine frequency resolution, and we can analyze high frequencies (the trees) at a very fine time resolution. Indeed, wavelets do allow us to see the forest and the trees!.