Overview of WaveLab

The WaveLab Toolbox provides the wavelet researcher with a high quality computing environment for many sorts of wavelet analyses.  The WaveLab Toolbox itself is free but it requires MatLab to run.  WaveLab/MatLab are available for most computer operating systems used today.  At UWO we have MatLab in our General Purpose Labs and also in the linux lab in the Statistical & Actuarial Sciences Department.  See also the links.

WaveLab was developed mainly under the direction of leading wavelet researchers at Stanford and Berkley Universities in order to provide a suitable Quantitative Programming Environment (QPE) for wavelet research.  This QPE serves three purposes:

1. Research published by the Stanford wavelet researchers and their colleagues is precisely documented.  Anyone can easily reconstruct any figure in their papers or books.  This is in accordance with their basic principle, Reproducible Research.  According to this principle, high quality research in Computational Science must provide the necessary tools so that another researcher can reproduce the computations and graphics with as much ease as possible.
2. Researchers at Stanford & Berkley also use WaveLab to try out new ideas advocated by others.
3. Professors at Stanford & Berkley use WaveLab to teach courses on wavelets.

The current version of WaveLab 0.802, released January 2000, contains over 10 MB of scripts, programs and data.  A researcher using WaveLab for wavelet computations only has to learn a WaveLab functions to get started.  The student studying wavelets has hundreds of illustrative MatLab script files which use these functions.  For maximum efficiency most the most important computations are done with efficient compiled C code but the MatLab user does not need to worry about this.  All the researcher must learn is how to use the simple MabLab functions for wavelet analysis provided by WaveLab.

Browsing Around in WaveLab

After WaveLab has been installed on your computer you should locate the main wavelet directory inside local matlab toolboxes.  On an MS-PC system, for example, this directory could be located: C:\MATLABR11\toolbox\WaveLab.  Open this directory using Windows Explorer or an equivalent File Manager on your system.

Open the file Contents.m .  All the main subdirectories and their purpose are indicated.  Each subdirectory has a Contents.m file which describes all files and subdirectories contained in it.  I have hyperlinked some of these Contents.m files inside this replica of the Contents.m file from the main subdirectory.

WaveLab Manuals

Aside from the documentation contained in these Contents.m and script files.  There are three WaveLab manuals available in pdf format:

Starting WaveLab

If you have WaveLab properly installed then when you startup up MatLab your opening screen should look this this:  Start of MatLab Session

For one-dimensional signals and time series, WaveLab provides a menu style control panel, WLBrowser.  Simply enter this command and use the menus.  Note you might have to re-size the windows slightly to access the control functions.