Time Frequency Analysis of Wavelet and Fourier Transform

Abstract

Signal processing has long been dominated by the Fourier transform. However, there is an alternate transform that has gained popularity recently and that is the wavelet transform. The wavelet transform has a long history starting in 1910 when Alfred Haar created it as an alternative to the Fourier transform. In 1940 Norman Ricker created the first continuous wavelet and proposed the term wavelet. Work in the field has proceeded in fits and starts across many different disciplines, until the 1990’s when the discrete wavelet transform was developed by Ingrid Daubechies. While the Fourier transform creates a representation of the signal in the frequency domain, the wavelet transform creates a representation of the signal in both the time and frequency domain, thereby allowing efficient access of localized information about the signal.