Books on Wavelets And Subband Coding?

Ktulu asks: "I'm looking for good books about wavelets applied to signal processing. I found one, 'Wavelets And Subband Coding' by M. Vetterli and J. Kovacevic (Prentice Hall) but it got quite bad reviews on Amazon. Are there good introductory and technical books you would recommend, covering wavelets, discrete wavelet tranforms and subband coding? Thanks."

The Wavelet Tutorial

[geirt]

by Robi Polikar is here: http://engineering.rowan.edu/~polikar/WAVELETS/WTt utorial.html [rowan.edu]

Wavelet tour of signal processing

[TimoT]

"A wavelet tour of signal processing" by Stephane Mallat is good, though heavy on the math...

A very readable introduction...

[CompVisGuy]

I have just read a particularly readable introduction: The Manual for the Matlab Wavelet Toolbox.

I presume that you have to buy the toolbox from The Mathworks [mathworks.com], but if you are a Matlab user and want to get into using wavelets (and their variants), this would be a very good first step!

The first couple of chapters give an "idiot's guide" to wavelets, and then things build up from there. The book includes examples of how to use the Wavelet Toolbox for both 1-D (e.g. time series) and 2-D (e.g. image) signals, case studies, a section on the more advanced topics (here's where you find the maths) and a function reference for the software included in the toolbox. There's plenty of nice diagrams and graphs to aid understanding.

Even if you don't intend to use Matlab, this book is worth reading as a general introduction. If you are in an academic environment, your library may have a copy, or perhaps some IT library/book dump somewhere.

For Matlab users, don't forget to check out the homepages of researchers currently developing wavelet-based techniques -- they are often very happy to let you have some code to play with.

Have fun!

Re:A very readable introduction...

[Anonymous Coward]

1. MATLAB toolbox manuals can be downloaded free from the mathworks site.
2. Don't trust Amazon reviews. Most have an axe to grind.

Strang's book

[d-Orb]

There's a book by Gilbert Strang. I have only browsed through it, but it looked reasonable. If any of his previous work on linear algebra (and applied maths in general) can be used as a metric for the quality of this one, it could be a very good piece of work.

Re:Strang's book

[superid]

I have Wavelets and Filter Banks Strang/Nguyen 1996 (Wellesley - Cambridge Press) I found it to be very readable and even interesting. There are about 4 chapters of filter banks before diving into the wavelet material and I think that helped clarify many new (to me) concepts.

See US Patent Office

[pbox]

Please search US Patent Office. You will find almost every aspect of the wavelets there. More comprehensive reading than any of the books.

It is sad, but true.

There aren't any!!!

[pagercam2]

I have done a lot of work on wavelets for image compression and looked at many of the books available a couple years ago and couldn't make heads or tails of any of them. I can give a 5 minute desciption that is so obvious to someone with a basic signal processing background that explains it all. The books are written by math nerds and there is a need for someone to derive the mathimatical basis and design new valid filters but the basics are made unreachable by the way these texts are written. Wavelets are very useful and the basic concepts are common sense but none of the books that I have ever seen give a description of the basics or why subband coding is a good idea and where it excells/fails. Wavelets are an extreme case but much of math/engineering/science is this way the experts seem to want to put themselves above everone esle and keep technology a mystery rather than sharing the wealth of knowledge. Its time to open source technology concepts and stop patenting every little idea.

Re:There aren't any!!!

[tprox]

This just brings us back to the chicken and the egg problem. Ideas as broad as wavelets require lots of "math nerds" to get down into the theory of it all. Then, those ideas are filtered until someone with the drive and determination to understand can take the ideas and bring them to see the light of day. Just because you don't understand it means that there aren't any good books out there. If you think you can bridge the gap between the theory and the practice, by all means, write a book! You just might make yourself rich :)

Can't vouch for the quality. . .

[Farley Mullet]

. . But if you go to Springer-Verlag's Website [springer-ny.com] and search on "wavelet" in the title, it comes up with a buttload of results, including this one [springer-ny.com] which looks right up your alley. And the best part is that Springer has a sale on until the end of the year, so some of the books can be had more cheaply (well, really, less expensively). And Springer books usually Don't Suck.

Also, I'd second ignoring Amazon reviews of technical books -- in general Amazon isn't the right forum to seek advice about technical books. Poplular fiction maybe, but not specialized texts.

Victor Wickerhauser's book

[majid]

My personal favorite is Adapted Wavelet Analysis from Theory to Software [wustl.edu] by Victor Wickerhauser [wustl.edu]. Victor wrote the fast wavelet routines I used in my tool XWPL [yale.edu], and he contributes practical coder's experience, not just theory. One of the examples he gives from his own personal experience is the FBI's fingerprint compression algorithm, developed in 1993 or so.