Wavelet:  A New Trend in Chemistry

Since 1989, wavelet transform (WT) has attracted much interest of chemists working on signal and image processing, and the WT-based techniques have been successfully applied to the chemical signal processing. This approach has been demonstrated as fast in computation with localization and having quick decay properties, in contrast to the popular methods existing, especially to the fast Fourier transform. More than 370 papers have been published up to the year 2002 which covered applications of WT in various fields of chemistry, including analytical chemistry, chemical physics, and quantum chemistry. In this paper, we report on applications of WT to data compression, data smoothing and denoising, baseline and background correction, resolution of multicomponent overlapping signals, regression and classification, and analytical images processing in analytical chemistry. Through this report we wish to induce greater interest of chemists in WT and to obtain greater benefits from using the WT-based techniques.