The
William E. Brice
Colloquium Series

Dr. Martin Vetterli*

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne
and
University of California, Berkeley

Signal Representations:
From Fourier to Wavelets and Beyond

Signals are at the heart of many scientific and engineering disciplines, and their representation problem dates back at least to J.Fourier, who proposed the idea of orthogonal series representations.

While Fourier series have many attractive properties, their limitations are well known. Probably the most interesting alternative has been provided by wavelets, a simple and computationally efficient way to represent signals and images. As a testimony to their impact, wavelets made it into an international standard, JPEG2000, less than a decade after their discovery.

We will discuss the problem of signal representation, approximation, and compression, and contrast classical solutions with new, wavelet based solutions. In particular, we compare classical linear approximation with the more powerful non-linear approximation used with wavelets.

We conclude by showing that not all is settled when it comes to the representation of higher dimensional data, where wavelets might be superceded by new, truly multidimensional bases.
Thursday, September 19, 2002
4:00p.m. - McMurtry Auditorium, Anne and Charles Duncan Hall
Rice University
Sponsored by:

Electrical and Computer Engineering Department

Host: Richard G. Baraniuk, (713) 348-5132, richb@rice.edu

Brice Colloquium Series

Comments and questions to: www-ece@ece.rice.edu

Last modified: June 17, 2002