Many phenomena around the research in document analysis and understanding are much better described through the powerful multiscale signal representations than by traditional ways. From this perspective, the recent emergence of powerful multiscale signal representations in general and fractal/wavelet basis representations in particular, has been particularly timely. Indeed, out of these theories arise highly natural and extremely useful representations for a variety of important phenomena in document analysis and understanding. This book presents both the development of these new approaches as well as their application to a number of fundamental problems of interest to scientists and engineers in document analysis and understanding.

The 2nd edition is an update of the book Wavelet Theory and its Application to Pattern Recognition published in 2000. Three new chapters, which are research results conducted during 2001-2008, are added. The book consists of three parts - the first presents a brief survey of the status of pattern recognition with wavelet theory; the second contains the basic theory of wavelet analysis; the third includes applications of wavelet theory to pattern recognition. The new book provides a bibliography of 170 references including the current state-of-the-art theory and applications of wavelet analysis to pattern recognition.