WaveLab Introduction

WaveLab is a library of MATLAB routines for wavelet analysis, wavelet- packet analysis, cosine-packet analysis and matching pursuit. The library is available free of charge over the Internet. Versions are provided for Macintosh, UNIX and Windows machines.

WaveLab has been used in teaching courses in adapted wavelet analysis at Stanford and at Berkeley. It is the basis for wavelet research by the authors, and may be used to reproduce the figures in their published articles, and to redo those figures with variations in the parameters.

WaveLab has over 1100 files which are documented, indexed and cross- referenced in various ways. MATLAB MEX files are used extensively to increase throughput.

In addition to routines implementing basic wavelet transforms for finite data sets (both periodic transforms and boundary-corrected transforms), wavelet-packet analysis, cosine-packet analysis and matching pursuit, the library contains scripts which the authors believe will assist in learning the practical aspects of wavelet analysis:

• Scripts that reproduce the figures in the authors' published articles, including the de-noising articles of Donoho and Johnstone.
• ``Workouts'' that give a quick guide to wavelets (1-d and 2-d); wavelet analysis; wavelet synthesis; wavelet and cosine packets, including the Coifman-W ickerhauser best-basis methodology; matching pursuit; and applications such as data expansion, progressive data transmission, image compression, speech segmentation, de-noising, fast matrix multiplication in wavelet bases, etc.
• Scripts that reproduce many of the figures in the the Book ``A Wavelet Tour of Signal Processing'' by Stephane Mallat.

WaveLab also offers:

• A library of datasets that are easily accessible to the user. Besides artificial signals that have scientific or pedagogical appeal, real data ranging from an image of Ingrid Daubechies to a recording by Enrico Caruso are included.
• A point-and-click browser that allows the user to select data, perform various transforms or de-noising operations, and then see the results without using the MATLAB command-line interface.
• Extensive documentation, including on-line documentation for each function, Contents files for each subdirectory, a Reference Manual, an Architecture Guide and an overview document, About WaveLab, that introduces the software to a first-time user.

Last modified: Oct 3, 1999