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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."
by Robi Polikar is here: http://engineering.rowan.edu/~polikar/WAVELETS/WTt utorial.html
RFC1925
"A wavelet tour of signal processing" by Stephane Mallat is good, though heavy on the math...
I presume that you have to buy the toolbox from The Mathworks, 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!
"The noble art of losing face will one day save the human race"---Hans Blix
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.
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.