Book excerpt: A central goal of signal processing is to describe real-time signals, be it for computation, compression, or understanding. This book presents a unified view of wavelets and subband coding with a signal processing perspective. Covers the discrete-time case, or filter banks; development of wavelets; continuous wavelet and local Fourier transforms; efficient algorithms for filter banks and wavelet computations; and signal compression. *provides broad coverage of theory and applications and a different perspective based on signal processing. *gives framework for applications in speech, audio, image and video compression as used in multimedia. *includes sufficient background material so that people without signal processing knowledge will find it useful.