
69
Chapter 3
Continuous Wavelet
Transforms
Lionel R. Watkins
Department of Physics
University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand
3.1 INTRODUCTION
Wavelets are simple, continuous functions that are scaled, translated, and
possibly rotated in a systematic way such that the entire family of wavelets
thus generated forms a suitable basis for representation of signals. e name
wavelet was coined in the early 1980s by French physicists and mathemati-
cians, who called these functions ondelettes, literally “small waves,” because
they are functions (with zero mean) that have a few oscillations that decay to
zero. ere are many types of “wavelet transform, ...