Compression of chemical signal using wavelet transform

Wavelet Transform (WT) had became a popular topic in chemistry and other fields of science starting from late 1980s, when compactly supported orthonormal wavelets and fast calculation algorithms were proposed by Mallat (1989) and Daubechies (1988) respectively. Meanwhile, Fourier transform (FT) plays a very important role in analytical methods in chemistry through Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and Infrared (IR) spectroscopy (Felinger, 1998). FT localized only in the frequency (or scale) domain but not in time (or position) domain, while WT is well localized in both. Furthermore, compared with FT, a large number of basis functions are available with WT, i.e., Haar, Daubechies, Coiflet, Spline, etc. In this paper, we will discuss the application of Fast Wavelet Transform (FWT) for data compression in chemistry. Some numerical results will be presented by using Matlab programming. © EuroJournals Publishing, Inc. 2009.